By on

7 Must-Ask Questions For Passive Investors On The Physical Property | Ep 31

James and Jessi holding our hands in the shape of a house
In this episode, we discuss the non-passive aspects of being a passive investor, notably the evaluations needed before investing. Learn about our 196-question vault that covers the eight phases of identifying a good deal, with a focus on property evaluation questions. Discover the classifications of properties, from Class A to F, and what to consider when assessing a potential investment. Gain insights into property management, renovation budgets, income and expense analysis, and more.

Listen to the Podcast

Show Notes

  • 00:00 Welcome to Furlo Capital Real Estate Podcast
  • 01:24 Evaluating the Property: Key Questions
  • 03:19 Property Classifications Explained
  • 10:25 Assessing Property Condition and Renovation Needs
  • 13:27 Handling Sponsor Conversations
  • 16:45 Understanding Income and Expenses
  • 19:21 Assessing Rent and Vacancy Rates
  • 21:20 Property Amenities and Security
  • 26:27 Final Thoughts and Resources

6 Key Lessons

  1. Thoroughly vet your investments: Ask comprehensive questions about the property and its management to ensure a well-informed investment decision.
  2. Understand property classifications: Recognize the different property classes (A, B, C, D) and their implications for maintenance, tenant quality, and cash flow.
  3. Conduct neighborhood research: Ensure the sponsor visited the area around the property to assess the community and surrounding amenities, helping you understand the property’s potential.
  4. Align improvements with the neighborhood: Ensure planned property improvements match the local area’s standards and market potential.
  5. Investigate the seller’s motivations: Determine that the sponsor knows why the owner is selling and analyzed the property’s physical and economic occupancy rates to uncover potential issues or opportunities.
  6. Use a checklists: Use guides like the 196-question vault to ensure you cover all aspects of property evaluation. https://furlo.com/good-deals-only-ebook

Watch the Podcast

Read the Transcript

James: Welcome to the Furlo Capital Real Estate Podcast, where we dive into the intricacies of passive real estate investing. And our mission, if you're new here is to equip people to invest wisely in both property and people so that together we can build our wealth while improving housing. I'm James, and this is my wife, Jessi.

Jessi: I'm here. Hey, sporting my swag today. Nice.

James: So am I, I got my hat on. Looks good. I like it. I should wear my hat. Oh, no. Then we'd be too matchy matchy. Oh, yeah,

Jessi: yeah. We don't want that.

James: Yeah. Then people would be like, what, are you guys married or something? Yeah. So, as I said in the intro, part of our, our mission here is to equip people to invest wisely and specifically to invest wisely as passive investors.

Now the thing about being a passive investor is that it's not 100 percent passive. You have to do some work, especially upfront and namely you have to do the work to decide, do I want to invest in this thing or not? So today I want to talk more about that. I created a 196 question vault, which is a lot of questions that goes through the eight different phases of investing, of identifying a deal.

And the name of the PDF is called good deals only because the idea is you invest in only deals. And so we've already talked about how do you evaluate the sponsor? And we've talked about how you evaluate the property manager that the sponsor has chosen.

Jessi: Right.

James: Today, I want to focus on how you evaluate the property.

Okay, so what I've done is I've printed off the two pages from that PDF. I didn't actually count how many questions there are total from that section.

Jessi: But I think we

James: can do the quick math. About 30

Jessi: ish.

James: About 30 ish? Yeah. Cool. And so, I've given it to you. You've obviously reviewed it. And what I'd love to do is have you read over it and say like, Hey, what are these questions?

Are there any that are that are, don't make sense or you want to know more about it that you're like, Oh, that's a really good one. Everyone absolutely should do it. And one of the things I've done, and for those of you watching the video, you'll be able to see it. I've actually highlighted in blue the questions that I personally think are particularly important.

I wouldn't skip those. And so with that, I'm kind of going to hand it over to you and let you talk about the different questions and have you shoot them back to me and I'll add more flesh to them as we go along.

Jessi: Awesome. And just to, just to put a little bit more context in this, I'm, or to like put myself in the, in the flow of like where I would use this, I'm, I'm pretending I'm a, an investor

James: and

Jessi: I don't really know much

James: because.

Jessi: I, if I, like, I want to invest passively. Well, someone like me, a

James: sponsor, has, we've already talked. Okay. Yeah. And you've got, hey, I've got some money to place. And I go, sweet. And I come to you and say, I found the deal of a lifetime. Okay. So you've

Jessi: given me It's amazing. Check this out. Some sort of information about a property.

Yep. And now I'm kind of following up and being like, okay, but what about this? What about that? Yep. Yep. Okay. That makes sense. So, there's, a lot of these are kind of like, details about the property. Right. Which I feel like Because

James: that's the section.

Jessi: If you're a good sponsor, and we've kind of chatted about this before, you will have given me a lot of this information in, in some sort of form or PDF or over the phone or something.

So a lot of it, I think, It's pretty, pretty self explanatory. What's the number of units? How occupied is it? What's the age of the property? What's the class of the property? Which, define class, I guess. Yeah,

James: so. Because I think it's

Jessi: like what it's used for, but

James: maybe not. No, no, no. So there's there's, typically there's three, and there could be up to like five classifications.

So there's class A, B, and C. And then depending on who you are, there's a D and an F.

Jessi: So is that quality of the product? Yeah, essentially.

James: So A is brand new build, right? So that's one of the things that we passively invested in, was a ground up from the bottom. And they turned it into a class of product.

And then you have B, which is still pretty good.

Those are usually in like the, the, the 10 to maybe 20-25 years old. Pretty good shape. They essentially, they look like they're new, but they're just not that extra special level. C class is typically the kind that we are looking for where there there's some deferred maintenance. There's some things that need to happen.

Maybe the tenants aren't all the, you know, professors and you know, engineers and those kinds of people, they're more just like regular folks. And that's usually where the classes stop. We have bought a D or a couple of D class properties. Those are typically ones where there's, there's some sort of problems.

There's like, there's drug issues, there's homelessness issues. There might be some massive problem with the property itself and that kind of stuff. And then I was classifying F is like, Hey, we're going to tear this thing down and start over. When we were camping. We're driving back, we actually drove by one of the properties that I looked at and it's a condemned building.

You cannot live inside of it. It's all boarded up. There's like, I would put that in the F class of property, 60 units, so really intriguing. They won't wait too much money for, again, a condemned, cannot live in a building. There's mold everywhere. It's a problem. But that's kind of the idea. And so what you want to know as an investor is, Hey, what are we getting into here?

And there's different. Implications behind the class so in a class property typically you're not going to have a huge amount of cash flow But it will appreciate a lot over time just because the percentage yeah, just because of how it works There's often there's often a lot less maintenance The tenants you tend to not have as many problems with them because they can all pay their rent that kind of stuff and with C class and especially with D.

That is more like You're going to get a higher cash flow, but you're going to have more issues. It's going to be more involvement. There's going to be more maintenance, that kind of stuff. And often if someone says, Hey, we're doing a value add deal, it's, we're taking it from a C class to a B class. It's typically what that is.

It's very rare. You go B to A, but you just can't because A is new and you can't fake that. You can do like a B, a B minus to a B plus. Or an F, which is demolish and then rebuild. Yeah, so you can go F to A. Yeah. Right, and, and, but that's, those are huge lifts. But they definitely happen, and the returns can be ginormous if you do it.

But that's what I mean by the classic property. And it's important to just not even, to note, what's the community like?

Jessi: Mm hmm.

James: You know, like I was looking at this place in Dayton, Ohio, and they had a property that was a C class and they were like, we're going to do a ton of renovations. We're going to make it awesome.

And we're going to bring it up to like the equivalent of an A, a B plus. I was like, cool. But you started looking around the neighborhood and you're like, this is kind of a B, B minus neighborhood. Like, will this work?

Jessi: Yeah. And

James: so those are the kinds of things that you want to think about when they tell you here's the class.

And more importantly, here's what Ryan at, and here's where we want it to end at. So like, we've got a flip going on. Right. And that's it was abandoned, there was an old man who lived in it. And and so that was, I put that in like, it's C at best. You know, you're going to get, someone would live there, but it's pretty low end.

And we are going to redo everything, and we're going to make that, it's not going to be brand new, but it's going to be BP plus when it's all done.

Jessi: And the neighborhood supports that level of

James: fix? Yeah, actually we know it'll work because there was a property right next door where they did exactly that.

Okay. And so, the model's already been approved. It's

Jessi: a good test case,

James: yeah. Yeah.

Jessi: Cool. Okay, so the follow up questions definitely support that. Does, you know, what's, what's the neighborhood like? Does it support more affluent or lower? Does it align with the surrounding area? Yeah, because you just want, you want to match it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I get having

James: aspirations like, we're going to make this place better. Yeah, that's great. But, you know, in general, you want to match where the neighborhood's at. Sure.

Jessi: Alright. Another, another question on here I think is interesting is why is the owner selling? Yeah.

James: Yeah.

Jessi: And. It's interesting to me because you know, the sponsor could just be looking for a deal, but there's motivation and nuance in how it's financed or how quickly it's going to close because of what the seller needs or doesn't need or wants.

So that's kind of an interesting question and it, it implies a lot of things. Yeah, and as a sponsor, I

James: generally, I try to figure that out because it just helps with the narrative. Here's the story. Here's what's going on. And like, for example, that same house that we're talking about, the guy had dementia and they were thinking about moving him in a hospice.

Like, that's why they're selling, right? The house. Is beat up and worn down, but it's has to do with more of a person issue as opposed to a property issue. And those are ones that I tend to gravitate. I mean, I traveled towards both, but it's usually, there's something going on in the seller's life. Yeah.

They just need to get rid of it.

Jessi: Yeah. And

James: it implies a different level of creativity and things. I think of

Jessi: another seller that. That you were telling me about is, is this, there was a need to move, you know, for a new job or just a lifestyle change or whatever it was, and so it was like, they just, yeah.

Wanted to be done and close fast so that they can move, you know? And I was like, okay, that's different motivation and other reasons. So okay. So this one, I, I'm not sure that I understand it. What's the physical occupancy for the trailing three month T3 and T12?

James: Yeah. Yeah. So T3 and T12 has to do, it's a bookkeeping type of thing.

So T3 equals the last three months.

Jessi: Okay. T12

James: equals the last 12 months. And it's like, Tab three or table three. It's a, it's an accounting term. I've, I've looked it up at one point. So pretty much who's

Jessi: been living in the property?

James: Well, you want to know physical occupancy, because there's economic vacancy rate, which is, goes all the way from like there's people living there, they're just not paying right now.

And that technically is a vacancy. It's just not, physical.

Jessi: Okay.

James: That's, that's, you know, it's, it's economic in a way. And so, so you want to, you're trying to figure out like how full is it and how many units do need to be filled versus how many people aren't paying and we need to go chase after them. Okay.

Those are two different skill sets and one of them is actually really easy to fix. The other one can be a lot harder in Oregon and that would be they're not paying is the harder one in Oregon. And, and then, yeah, the T3 and T12. Just really help, like, ultimately you want to ask for the entire T12 and then you can pay attention to last, the last three months because from an expense standpoint, everything, a lot of things are cyclical, like electric, electricity is a prime example of that and, and you can see where that trend is going when it comes to rents, which we really care about are those last three months, not necessarily the previous, the last 12, because They may have increased the rents, in which case a yearly average doesn't work anymore.

What you really want is the last three months average.

Jessi: Mm hmm. That makes sense. It's like, what's the, where are you at currently?

James: Yeah. And where can

Jessi: we

James: go from here? And you also want to know where you were at, so we can kind of get an idea for the trend.

Jessi: Yeah. The next kind of several talk about what needs to happen to the property essentially.

So it's, it's almost like there's, there's probably seven or eight in a row that are like, Where is the property currently at as far as like how many units have been renovated? What was done in each of them? What's the list of improvements that have been made? Yeah. And then what, like, what's the timeline of when things were touched?

I guess, like, has electric been touched? Has plumbing been touched? Has the roof been replaced? You know, the big systems.

James: Yeah. And it's really trying to flush out the, what class is this?

Jessi: Okay. So giving, well, giving like measurables for which class. And it has big

James: implications for the construction budget.

Because if they come in and be like, Hey, you know what, it's a class B, and they haven't done any repairs in the last two years, and we think the renovation budget for this 40 unit apartment building is 10, 000, you go, what's wrong? Or if they even go, we think the renovation budget for this thing is 400, 000, you go, huh, only 10, 000 per unit, really?

Given all these other things that like that may not line up because for you and me like 400 grand like oh my gosh That's so much money Like is it though? And because I know some people like again this single family home. I'm gonna keep bringing it up We're spending a hundred thousand dollars on essentially one three bed one bath unit Yeah, and so that just helps you get an idea But if they're like No, they've they've done this full renovation for it.

Everything's full, they've taken care of all the big systems in the last couple years. So our renovation budget genuinely is like 50, 000. You go, alright, that makes sense. Like, that explains the story. So you're just trying to line up the story with yours. And as a,

Jessi: as a passive investor, I mean, my hope is like, yes, I would want to know that these questions are being asked.

But my hope is that you're using your expertise to be like, Okay, I've looked at this property. I've taken stock of all that needs to be done. I've done the math for you. And here, here's the goal. Like here's what we're going to spend, but

James: it's a trust, but verify situation. And so you're just making sure what they say makes sense up.

Yep. And you're trying to get a sense for how hard, because it's like, yeah, well,

Jessi: yeah, because if I haven't spent a ton of time researching, like how much house projects cost, you know, I could hear that number and be like, yeah, 10, 000. I don't know. That sounds like a lot. And you might be like no? There's another

James: section here that is all, not another, this is section three.

Oh, a whole nother section. Which someday we'll get to. That talks about the construction plan in particular. Okay. And that's where you can start to dive into those kind of numbers. Tell me more about the construction company. Do you actually have bids? Are you just guessing? Like, where are

Jessi: you getting your numbers from?

Yeah,

James: yeah.

Jessi: Okay, that kind of makes sense. Yeah,

James: I know. Because you would want to get an idea for The other part of it is if you've got a sponsor who's relatively new

Jessi: and

James: they've like, yeah, I'll have done our single family homes that were already in good shape. And then they go, and now I'm buying this 10 unit place.

That's a dumper. You go, Ooh, it's a lot of work. Do you have that kind of experience? Have you dealt with something like this? How do you handle some of these things? And usually it's like, you know, a half hour conversation with the sponsor. You're going to flush out some of these things. And again, like you said, ideally they'll, address a lot of them as well.

Again, the whole point of this is, I mean, number one, you've got to trust a sponsor. If you don't, don't invest. And, but, you also do want to do your own due diligence of making sure you understand the deal because you're going to put 50, 000 to 100, 000 to 200, 000 into this deal for the next five to seven years.

Jessi: So,

James: you know, spend the time to really understand what it is that you're investing in and where your money's going for.

Jessi: Makes sense. Okay, so this next section talks about the I'm going to jump ahead, because we kind of talked about the units and what needs to happen there. But is the property poorly managed?

James: Yeah.

Jessi: And, and kind of why? Was it self managed? Was it managed by a company and they just got too big? You know, what does the sponsor think about how they are going to manage it? Yeah. And what that would entail? Yeah. So all the management type, why is it in its current state and how, how are you going to improve it?

James: Yeah, because there's a lot of properties out there where the properties would be fine if they were managed well. The physical building is good. And sometimes it's, they're, like, I was looking at this one property where the owner died. And then the, the, the family took it on and they're like, we don't, we've had no experience with this.

We don't know what we're doing. And they're like, but the idea of paying a property manager doesn't make any sense. And so we're not gonna do it. Or this actually surprises me a lot. You get a property manager. Who they'll hire them, but then they'll hamstring the property manager cause they'll say things like, Well, we only want the best of the best tenants.

Ones who have their income is five times and their credit score is a 750 plus and we don't want any issues. And they go, cool. And they just start sitting vacant. And it's like, it's

Jessi: very small and that's where the property

James: manager could do a better job of like, all right, let me bring you along. Let me educate you.

Let me show you what we're doing. Let me build some trust with you. And that just sometimes doesn't happen or for whatever reason, they've got some, you Or there was like there was another property I was looking at up in Portland where this guy, he, his model was to kick everybody out and then just totally redo everything.

Again, he's going for that B plus A class thing. And, and then he ran out of money partway through and went, Oh shoot. So now I had this vacant property that was half repaired and like, what do I do? Right. And that was just, he mismanaged the budget type of thing where you go, okay, the business plan was a good idea.

He just wasn't well capitalized.

Jessi: Hmm.

James: And that situation is actually hard because no bank will loan on it, because they're like, dude, we don't loan on those projects right now.

Jessi: And

James: so you would have to come to the table with all the cash, which hurts your return on investment. So,

Jessi: could you say in that scenario, if you were a passive investor who invested with that sponsor, perhaps you didn't do all the due diligence you should have done?

James: Yeah, I know in that case he wasn't using anyone else's money, but, yes, if you were, that's where And sometimes that happens, right? As a sponsor, let's say you do run out of money, now you have a choice. You either sell it, and try to return as much of the investor capital as you can, or you go back to them and say, Hey, I need more money.

We're doing a capital call. Yeah, that's risky business. No one likes that. So often times investors will be like, No, I'm just going to sell it as is, and we're going to try to get everyone's money back, and I might make nothing, and I will just try to return everyone's capital. Interesting.

Jessi: Alright. The next two are about income.

So, if rents are low, What's making them low? And I would even put a follow up on there like, What's the, how much could you increase them? What would that look like? And is there a limit? And how do you know it?

James: Yeah, those are good questions. Yeah, and that's the questions you should ask. Yeah, you

Jessi: should ask that.

That's great. That's good. And then, I mean similarly are the expenses high? And why might they be high? Yeah. How are we, what's the plan for reducing expenses? Like I was looking at this one property

James: and it's a 32 unit building and there was an electrical expense of 11, 000 a year.

Jessi: Yeah.

James: And I was like, what are they spending a thousand or, you know, 900, 800 bucks on per month?

Yeah. Like this is, this is confusing to me. And so that's the kind of thing where, cause I know in Oregon as a general rule, the electrical bill for a multi family is going to be in like that. One, the $200, right? Maybe for like outside lights or Mm-Hmm. for water heaters. Like it shouldn't be very high at all.

And, and so that to me was like,

Jessi: Oh, interesting. I want to know more

James: now. I definitely underwrite it to that number and I go, Hey, that's real. It is what it is, but that's the kind of thing. And as a passive investor, ideally the sponsor is going to point it out and go, Hey, there's some low hanging fruit right here.

I'm going to add 10 grand to this thing. And in a five cap market, you know, that's, that's huge. And so So that's the kind of thing, yeah, you want to, and obviously you don't necessarily know what is out of bounds pro tip, you should expect expenses to be like 40 percent of revenue in general. And if it's way off from that you'd be like, huh, just ask questions cause there might be a really good reason for it.

And again, like in my case, that one example, I was like, yeah, it is off and I'm going to fix it. My guess in that particular case, because I don't actually know, is they just had some deals with tenants who, or they asked them to put the electricity in their name and they never did and they never followed up.

They just kind of paid it and were like, whatever it is what it is, the pot slowly boiled. Or they had some sort of deal where maybe they were on HUD and HUD was like, hey, you have to pay for the utilities. The tenant can't do it. So like, okay, fine. Like, I don't know. I've seen, I've seen stuff like that.

Jessi: Hmm. But either way. Research it. Ask about it. Ask about it. Figure it out.

James: In a multifamily, you shouldn't see electrical as an expense, or it should not be very big. And ideally, the total expenses are in that 40 percent range. Cool.

Jessi: And then, how does the rent roll, so the money that you're bringing in, or that has been brought in, how does it compare against the underwriting's gross potential rent and vacancy rates?

James: Yeah.

Jessi: So essentially, you're, you're kind of comparing like, how much is it making now? as to how much it could make.

James: Yeah, so gross potential rent is if everything was rented at the current possible market rates here's how much money it would make. But a But a property is never rented at that because someone who rented six months ago is no longer at the market rate, right?

And so there's always some factor in there that's somewhere in like the that two to potentially like 10 percent I guess

Jessi: Okay,

James: I mean if they're managing it, well, it's gonna be two to five percent. Okay, and and so it's kind of in there But then yeah, there's all another vacancy rate piece and In Oregon, honestly, like vacancy rates are like at 2 percent right now.

It's kind of ridiculous. So I, I would love to underwrite them at like 15%.

Jessi: I

James: usually find that's way too conservative and it just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't match reality. So I'm usually in like that, man, we'll do 5 percent vacancy and then I'll typically try to tack on another 5 percent for the economic piece.

So I'm just not paying stuff like that, but you want to compare, here's what it actually was versus what they're saying.

Jessi: And

James: ideally what you find is that those numbers are pretty similar and That the the sponsor's not just being like, Oh yeah, no, we're going to increase everything 100%. Or if they are, they're going to have a really good reason for it.

Yeah, they have to have

Jessi: reasons for it. And then some of the, some of these follow up questions alluded to the same, to the same thing. So, what's the average rent in the last 90 days? How does that compare to the overall average rent of, of surrounding properties?

James: Again, that 90 days is important.

Right? Because you don't want to do this for the entire year. You want to be like more recent. What are those rents? Because it doesn't, because the rent isn't, the future rent isn't the average of the last year. Yeah. And the future rent is the last month. Okay. Carried forward. Sure. And so that's why you want to just, and that's the whole point of the T3 versus T12.

Jessi: Okay. And then a couple just property questions. What's the replacement cost of the property? Is it in a flood zone? Yeah. Parking to unit ratios?

James: Mm hmm.

Jessi: And how does that compare? Cause that just, that helps with desirability. Yeah.

James: You know, that's one of like, we have our apartment building, and there's only street parking.

There's enough for everybody, but it is only street parking. It doesn't have

Jessi: its own separate Versus

James: desirability, and so you go, okay, that's good to know.

Jessi: Yeah. Just other factors to help, to help evaluate the property, the costs of the property. I would

James: recommend as a sponsor, whenever you're, no, as a passive investor, whenever you're looking at a deal, hop onto rentometer.

com or go to Craigslist or Facebook marketplace and just search in that area for that type of rentals, just to get an idea for what rents are at and just be like, huh, these are in the ballpark and they should be in the ballpark.

Jessi: Is it the kind of thing to Like, this sounds kind of creepers to me, maybe, but, but I'm also like, I figured idea.

I was just thinking if you're local and you know where the property is at, could you like drive around that neighborhood and just get a feel for the types of properties and who you see walking around? Yeah, I know. A hundred

James: percent. I definitely think, and you should, Oh, as a passive investor.

Jessi: Yeah, yeah,

James: sure.

I mean, I

Jessi: don't know. Totally. Yeah. If you know,

James: I

Jessi: mean, you might as well, cause I'm very visual. I know. And so I'm like, that would help me a lot to like. Know where the property's at and what it's next to and what does it look like in that area. Yeah,

James: there's a podcast that I follow. This guy, his goal is to raise 200 million dollars, which is a lot of money.

Like over his

Jessi: lifetime?

James: No in the next year.

Jessi: Oh!

James: Yeah, and, but it's for this massive project that he's doing. And he actually talks about doing investor days where he's like, Do we, again, we're talking big sums of money here. And, you know, everyone's writing a million dollars or more type of chat. And he goes, we fly everybody in.

And we do like, we're going to do a fancy dinner and that's where we're going to talk about the deal. We're going to talk about the property. They're going to go through all 196 types of things. He goes, and then the next day we're all going to get up and we're going to take a tour of the property and we're going to look at the at the neighborhood and he's like, we're going to, and they're all going to get to know each other and we're going to do some networking and I'm like, dude, that's pretty awesome.

That works well for big ticket stuff. I'm not quite at that level, but I'm like, oh, that is, it's an intriguing idea. So no, it's not creepy at all. And for bigger stuff, that definitely happens.

Jessi: Yeah, it makes sense. Okay. Last few types of things. This one I thought was a little weird, but I, but I guess I get it.

Is there an office on the property? Does it need to be upgraded? And is it functional? And will the property manager like be using that or living on site or be off site, which I, which I guess kind of makes sense. It's more of like a management question.

James: Yeah. You're just, again, you're just trying to get a feel for how's this thing going to be run and often the office is an expense.

It's not this, Hey, we're going to rehab this unit and then we're going to rent it out. Right. So you want to know those kinds of things. And and again, it's just helping. You, as a passive investor, get a good, like, visual or story behind what is this investment fund doing. How does this run? And that's kind of related to, like, what are all the amenities?

Is there a pool? Is there a gym? Is there a I don't know. They used to have, like, office centers, but that's kind of, like, it's not really a thing anymore. Not really. Thanks, internet! But yeah, so that that's So that's kind of related to that. Is there an office, is there a laundry room or are they amenities?

Yeah. You're just trying to get a sense for what's, what does this place offer?

Jessi: Okay. And then there's a specific one on here about signage. Does it need to be upgraded? What does it look like? And does it need city approval? Yeah. I would tend to think like even more broad than that, like anything physical, you know, as far as like there, there was one kind of on here of like, what's the Curb appeal, I guess, or what's the traffic going by it?

Can you, does that help with renting or not? Does the signage help with renting it out or not? You know, all those sorts of things. I think it's a good, those ones

James: aren't highlighted. They're just, yeah, they're just, they're extra

Jessi: ones building that story. I think it like, especially where we're at, it seems like the city approval piece is important because it is a hangup for a lot of different things.

And so it's like, you know, you want to check that and be like, all right, you have this plan, like. How are you going to get it through? And is it approved? And all those sorts of things. And then last is security. Like, what's the security like at the property? Are there cameras around or not? Is there a guard?

James: Yeah. Or not?

Jessi: Is there a fence? Or not?

James: Yeah. And those all become more important as properties get bigger. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, so there you go. There you go. That gives you kind of an overall Picture of the property. And again, this is one of what to ask about the property. Eight pieces. Mm-Hmm. . And I just think again, they're, the good thing is to help you get a full picture of this investment.

Mm-Hmm. that you're going to put 50 to a hundred to $250,000 in for the next five to seven years. Yeah. And so you just like, it's, this is part of the non, non-passive piece of it. Which again, not that hard. They're just asking questions. Mm-Hmm. probing. And you're not trying to necessarily get the sponsor in a gotcha moment, right.

You're just trying to understand Yeah. More about what is this deal. I'm like, dude, we'll talk about this all day. I love it. It's super fun. Let me tell you. So so yeah, there you go. And thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, we would leave it. We would love it if you left a review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts.

And if you would like to learn more about investing with us, or actually more importantly downloading this full 196 question vault, go to furlo.com and there you'll see that along with a whole bunch of other really cool stuff. So with that, thanks for listening and have a great day.

Let's build your wealth and
improve housing, together

Share what you learned

Furlo Capital Podcast

Furlo Capital
Real Estate Podcast

A conversational podcast between James and Jessi Furlo that dives into the intricacies of passive real estate investing. Our mission is to equip people to invest wisely in both property and residents so that, together, we can build wealth and improve housing.

Listen Anywhere

Let's build your wealth and improve housing, together

Passive Income

Tenants pay monthly rent, which covers expenses and generates a profit for investors. Plus, multifamilies appreciate and usually sell for a significant profit.

Consistent Above-Average Returns

Real estate is less volatile and historically outperformed the S&P 500 by routinely generating average annual returns of at least 10% after fees, inflation, and taxes.

Revitalize Local Communities

We give people a great, safe place to call home. This doesn’t hit the spreadsheet, but every property is managed and maintained with the residents as a top priority.

Extraordinary Tax Benefits

Your income is taxed much lower because of depreciation and because it’s taxed at a lower capital gains rate.

Below-Average Risk

More units mean less vacancy sensitivity. Plus, costs are distributed across a larger number of units, which also allows us to hire a professional property manager.

Leverage

Unlike stocks, lenders like to finance multifamilies and the loans are tied to the property, not the person. This accelerates wealth building.