How To Set Up a Real Estate Fund Like A Pro with Matt Burk | S3SP22
In the latest episode of the A.CRE Audio Series, Spencer, Sam, and Michael delve into the world of real estate investment funds with Matt Burk, CEO of Fairway America. Matt brings a wealth of experience, having transitioned from individual deals to pooled investment funds in the late ’90s. This episode explores various facets of real estate fund management, from understanding the ideal profile of a sponsor to considerations for LPs (limited partners) and different fund structures.
Watch, listen, or read this episode below to learn about various asset types, fund structures, and considerations for investors.
How To Setup a Real Estate Fund Like A Pro with Matt Burk
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Resources from this Episode
- A.CRE Real Estate Financial Modeling Career Accelerator
- Education in Real Estate
- A.CRE Career Articles
Episode Transcript
Announcer (00:01):
Welcome to the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. Join Michael Belasco and Spencer Burton as they pull back the curtain on everything commercial real estate, and introduce you to some of the top minds in the industry. If you want to take your skills to the next level and be part of a growing community of CRE professionals across the world, this is for you.
Sam Carlson (00:26):
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the podcast here. We’re excited to have Matt Burk here today with Fairway America. It doesn’t matter what stage of the game you’re in, raising money is always a challenge, and so we’d love to have guests who are very well-versed in these things. Matt, that sounds like that would be you, my friend. How are you doing?
Matt Burk (00:48):
I’m good. Thanks guys for having me. I appreciate it.
Sam Carlson (00:51):
Yeah, we’re excited to talk to you. Spencer, maybe frame out the episode and let’s get going.
Spencer Burton (00:56):
Sure. Yeah. Thanks again, Matt, for joining. Matt’s CEO of Fairway America, I’ll let you, Matt, give an intro to you and your company. But as I frame out the episode, here’s how I think of it. A lot of us raise capital on an asset-by-asset basis. Whether it’s one investor or a syndication of investors, we’ll do it asset by asset. Oftentimes, it becomes valuable to raise it more at the pool level, maybe a programmatic level, and Matt’s going to be able to speak to that in more depth. We’re going to bring Michael into the discussion. Michael has a project, that many of you’re aware of in the greater Seattle area, and is looking to build a national platform around that concept.
In a way, Matt and Michael can speak directly to one another as Michael thinks about his capital raise challenges ahead of him. Let’s start though, Matt. For the audience, give an overview of who you are, what your background looks like, and then in particular, what you’re doing at Fairway America.
Matt Burk (02:02):
Yeah. I think my background is I started life as a lender. When I started my own business, I started as a broker and eventually started doing private money loans. I evolved from doing… At that time, we would do small commercial and non-owner Rock Residential things that banks wouldn’t touch. This goes back away, so I’m dating myself. But we would match one investor, one deal at a time. Sometimes we would put multiple investors into the trust deed, and so forth. I reached a point where the volume was significant enough that I thought, “Hey, maybe doing this in a pooled fund format.” I’d heard of other people doing it, didn’t really know what it meant, and went down the path of creating a fund for ourselves. This is the late ’90s, early 2000s. We created our first pooled investment fund.
(02:53):
I’ve made the leap from doing deals one at a time to doing them in a pooled investment fund, and have since done them both ways. But over the years, I did multiple funds. Coming out of the Great Recession, when we were winding down our then largest real estate fund, I had people coming to me asking for advice and guidance around what it’s like to run a fund.
I had two or three people in the real estate space say, “Hey, Matt. I know you know a lot about funds. I’m thinking about setting up a real estate fund, what do you think of this? What about this issue? What about that one?” As we were looking for a business model, it occurred to me that there are a lot of people out there who are real estate folks raising money from other people that would like to do it in a pooled format and they don’t really have a great place to go.
(03:37):
That was true then, and I think it’s still true today. To get the real information they need to help them set it up properly, to help them assess whether they should even set it up or not in the first place, try to keep their costs under control, historically, people have to go to a lawyer to do that. Obviously, lawyers are necessary and you still need to have a securities lawyer to make sure that you’re doing things legally, but the lawyer generally has never run a fund. They don’t understand all the interconnected parts of how you put it all together. We started doing that as a line of business, Spencer, back in 2012, and have since done hundreds of funds in an advisory capacity for other managers around the country who want to set up their own pooled investment fund.
(04:28):
We’ve built a lot of other component parts onto it after that. We actually do backend fund administration through our sister company, Verivest. We make investments in and alongside these managers to help seed the real estate fund and get them off the ground and things like that. But basically, the core of it is helping real estate operators, managers, syndicators, private lenders go from running their business one deal at a time, raising capital one deal at a time, to doing it in a pooled fund format and all of the things that go along with making that leap. I did it myself and then became someone who helps other people do it basically.
Spencer Burton (05:06):
Yeah. It’s a bit of a black box for people. They know about funds, but the process to start and get it finished is a mystery for many of us. To the managers and sponsors who are listening, or maybe a perspective future managers and sponsors, what is the ideal profile of a sponsor? When is the moment when the real estate fund vehicle makes sense for a sponsor? What does that look like?
Matt Burk (05:36):
Yeah. Of course, there’s no one magic moment, of course. But I would say in having done this now hundreds and hundreds of times, you certainly see themes across different folks that would tend to make them more conducive rather than less. I’d see people who try to go straight to doing a fund. I don’t recommend that. You want to do some number of deals one at a time. I think it’s helpful to have built out enough infrastructure as an operating company that you have enough volume that wants doing it in a pooled fund format, because it is not cheap. I mean, you have to pay for the offering documents. There’s compliance work involved, there’s entities, there’s tax returns, sometimes audits, cost of raising capital. It definitely requires at least a little bit of scale that can vary significantly from one asset strategy to another.
(06:31):
I also think that people who do deals that have a higher velocity, the cash turns over quicker. For example, short-term bridge loans that are only outstanding for six months or a year or less, that money gets recycled, so you don’t have to raise as much money to be successful if you’re turning the money over quicker. That always helps. I think you need to have the right combination of people that do various component parts. You need to have somebody who is at least willing to be dedicated toward the capital raise side of the equation and doing it in a fund format to be successful.
The big thing I see always, over and over again, is real estate people, they like real estate. They love the deal and they want to spend all their time talking about and focused on real estate, but running a fund is a business unto itself. There’s other things that people need to be willing to commit to. Having a commitment to that and enough people and someone who’s willing to do it is important. Team, deal strategy, deal size, velocity, infrastructure, those are all important characteristics.
Spencer Burton (07:40):
What about from the LP’s perspective? Why a real estate fund over a one-off investment or vice versa? How do you think about that?
Matt Burk (07:51):
Yeah. Like in anything and in the world of investments, there’s no one size fits all. Nothing’s right for everybody. It depends on people’s individual investment objectives, and comfort level, and so forth. But basically, the biggest difference is that in an individual deal, the investor gets to pick and choose which specific deal they want to be in. There’s at least, theoretically, more of a degree of control for that investor to choose what deal to go into. They might like this kind of property better or this geographic region better.
(08:25):
In a fund, the investor is abdicating basically all authority on the choice of the investments to the manager, so they don’t have as much control over what they’re putting their money into. But that said, they get greater diversification because they’re not putting all of the money into one single investment, that if it doesn’t perform, then they’re more susceptible to concentration risks. Diversification is a big deal. They don’t get the money back and have to put it back out as often in a fund. It lasts longer. For some people, they’d rather not have to deal with it and think about it. There’s just trade-offs, Spencer, I’d say. It’s not a one size fits all. Sometimes the syndication is better for certain investors and sometimes the real estate fund is better. It just depends.
Spencer Burton (09:10):
Let me set it up for Michael, if I could, Michael. Go ahead. No.
Michael Belasco (09:15):
Yeah. I was wondering just on the macro level still here for our listeners, can you give us a smattering of just all the different types of funds that you guys have done? Whether it’s positions in the capital stack, asset classes, anything would be great to hear.
Matt Burk (09:32):
Yeah. One of the things that’s always fascinating with me, Michael, in real estate, is there are so many different ways to play in the space and to make money at the space and so many different strategies. I mean, we have done direct ownership of real estate in just about every asset class you can think of. Retail, office, industrial, multifamily, self storage, assisted living. You name it, we’ve seen it. We do a lot of mortgage pool funds. Investment is the manager is making loans secured by property as opposed to buying the property directly. That’s a different animal because the assets are debt, not equity. We’ve seen pref equity funds. We see a lot of fix and flip funds, so the managers are buying single family houses and then fixing them up, turning them. That’s a much quicker turn, to my point earlier.
(10:29):
I’ve done a lot of fix and flip funds. You’ll see buy and hold. Buy the property, rent it out, play the longer game. We’ve done discounted and distressed debt acquisition funds for people buying existing loans at a discount either individually or in pools. We have done tax lien certificates, people who acquire tax lien certificates at county auctions and so forth. A lot of different types of funds and different ways to make money.
I think one of the keys that we try to bring to people is that depending on that asset strategy, that drives what your capital structure should look like. You’ll often see somebody with an asset strategy that they put the wrong capital structure behind it and it just doesn’t work very well. That’s where we provide what I think is a great deal of value to people to help them think through all these things on the front end so that they maximize their chances of both raising money and having it not be overly administratively burdensome based on a structure that just doesn’t work.
Michael Belasco (11:33):
Yeah. Can you elaborate a little bit on that in terms of somebody approaching? I guess you guys try to head that off before it goes live.
Matt Burk (11:41):
That’s right.
Michael Belasco (11:42):
But maybe give us some type of insight of something where somebody came to you and they had this idea and the structure, maybe they were giving away too much, or maybe there’s some other insights you can have just on just some sort of low hanging fruit opportunities.
Matt Burk (11:56):
Yeah. I mean, I could tell all kinds of stories, man. I mean, I have one from a couple days ago. A guy just gotten two quotes from lawyers in Manhattan, one for 96,000 and one for 118,000 to put the real estate fund together. I’ve get people that have paid 50 or 100 grand to a lawyer, and then they end up with…
It’s a small manager, let’s say, doing a fix-and-flip strategy, but the lawyer put them into an institutional-looking fund that they’d created for other people for acquisition of downtown office towers, and it just doesn’t work. The manager goes out, it’s a sump cost, they’ve spent all the money with the lawyer, and then they go out and figure out that they can’t raise any money. They come to us and we say, “Well, hey, look, this is just not the right structure, in our opinion,” but of course they’ve already spent the money with the lawyer, so it’s frustrating for people. That happens all the time.
Michael Belasco (12:54):
It’s like know your audience, know your potential investors. I’ve had some of that where you come out from an institutional background and you go to raise from friends and family, and regardless of what work you put in, if you put something in front of them, they don’t understand what they’re looking at, they’re not going to invest.
Matt Burk (13:12):
That’s right.
Michael Belasco (13:13):
If it’s too over the top, it’s not what they’re speaking. Yeah. Yes.
Matt Burk (13:16):
I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s like parallel universes. You can learn a lot, certainly, from the institutional world in terms of best practices, and how to run a fund, and all of that, but you can’t simply extrapolate that into the small manager world who’s doing small deals and raising five or 10 or 20 or 30 million bucks because it just doesn’t translate. There’s certainly bits of learning, but you can’t just take a direct application. It just doesn’t work.
Spencer Burton (13:46):
When you think about mom-and-pop investors and it’s a real estate fund structure, in your experience, what is a real estate fund structure, a fee structure, a profit share structure that you’ve seen is most appealing to those mom-and-pop investors?
Matt Burk (14:09):
Yeah. I mean, guys, that’s another thing, is not only are there so many different types of real estate assets, there’s a lot of different ways to structure the fund. I’d say, certainly and appealing thing to a lot of people, Spencer, from the investor perspective, is they know exactly what they’re getting in the terms of what the return’s going to be. Debt can be very attractive to an investor, because I’m getting a fixed interest rate. I know when the maturity date is. I’m getting a 10 99 instead of a K-1. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s not hard to understand. For a lot of investors, that works really well. But depending on your asset type, if you’re buying property and it’s value add and it’s backloaded, then you really can’t pay a debt coupon because there’s no income coming in to pay the debt.
(14:56):
All you’re really doing is paying them back with their own money, which frankly, I’ve seen a lot of that happen too. People don’t even realize that that’s what’s happening, either the manager or the investor. There’s a lot of people running funds that don’t fully understand the accounting and the mechanisms behind it, that are raising money from investors who also don’t understand the accounting or the mechanisms behind it. We try to help people just sort through all of that and make it match up.
I think depending on an investor’s objectives, if they’re looking, let’s say, for tax advantages, then a note is not really a good structure because it’s just ordinary income and there are no tax advantages. They probably want to focus more on a real estate fund that is investing in property so that they can pass through the depreciation and any losses, and they can take advantage of that in a J-curve scenario.
(15:50):
It really just depends on what an investor’s looking for. It can be very difficult for people to, first of all, understand exactly what they’re trying to do, and then try to go out and target and find things that meet that criteria, but that’s what we try to encourage investors to do. Step one, what are you trying to achieve? Step two, only then focus on those that actually will have a chance at hitting that objective.
Michael Belasco (16:21):
I wanted to ask just based on how things have gone this past couple of years. Capital markets, interest rate environment, I wanted to ask what you’re seeing in your day-to-day and if just the nature of raising funds has been impacted. If so, how? Any sort of insights into what’s going on today and what you see in the future that may impact this process?
Matt Burk (16:50):
Yeah. Well, last couple years, I’d say tale of two years. I mean, the first year of the last two years was pretty good. The last year has been… Interest rates have skyrocketed and it’s much, much more difficult. Yeah, it’s far more difficult to raise capital in the current environment. But that said, I think there’s a gigantic amount of interest in alternative investments generally. There’s a much higher percentage of people’s money that’s being invested in alternative investments. Registered investment advisors are allocating more and more dollars than they ever have into that side of the equation. I do think on balance, that it cycles. There’s always cycles. I think you’re in a cycle right now where it’s much harder, but it won’t last forever.
(17:38):
How long does it last? I don’t know. I mean, if I could hazard a guess, but my crystal ball is not working all that well compared to anybody else’s crystal ball. I would tell you this. There are a lot of managers or aspiring managers out there coming to us these days wanting to set up funds because they view now as an excellent time to be starting a new vehicle.
Obviously, if you have existing assets in your portfolio, you have to work through them as best you possibly can, for better or worse, depending on the individual circumstances. I’d say managers are in a position where, on the one hand, you’re managing existing assets that some of which you’re doing great and some of which may not be doing so great, but you’re also setting up vehicles for the next batch of acquisitions based on a whole new reality of pricing exploration.
(18:43):
You’re finally starting to see, at least I am, sellers capitulating to the reality, and you’re starting to see some more buying opportunities. But it’s interesting to hear people come into us these days and listen to their strategy on how to take advantage of what’s happening in the current market. Again, to my point earlier, everybody’s got a different angle on how to do it. I’m seeing a lot of people that are in the process of setting it up, anticipating that they’ll be able to raise money as the market starts to improve.
Spencer Burton (19:15):
Let’s get into Michael’s situation. Again, more as a prototype for how an initial discussion, Matt, you might have with a sponsor. I’m going to set it up, Michael, and then let you, you and Matt, go a couple minutes on this. Michael has a project in the Greater Seattle area. It’s a development project, but it’s around a national strategy that’s not just purely development. It’s really identifying assets that are adjacent to big demand drivers. I don’t know, Michael, how much you want to get into what those demand drivers are, but essentially, there are these built-in demand drivers around the country, these locations that perpetually are going to drive demand and grow demand.
(20:03):
He has a certain product type that he either will develop or he’ll do a value add in and around those demand drivers. The programmatic strategy is ride the growth in that demand and build a national platform around them. As you hear that first, what’s the first piece of advice you give to Michael as he’s thinking about how he should structure putting capital in place to allow him to scale something like that?
Michael Belasco (20:34):
If you need any more color… Go ahead.
Matt Burk (20:37):
Yeah. I would add, if we were having a conversation and you were calling in, I would ask a whole bunch of questions. I know we won’t have time to go through the whole role play probably in this conversation, but things like what specifically types of product are you developing? How much is it going to cost? How much financing do you get? What sort of equity do you need for any individual transactions? Paint a range of the size of transactions that you would do. What is your originations or acquisition capability of finding these locations that fit the criteria that you’re talking about? How much would that take in capital to do it on a national scale?
If you haven’t already, I absolutely would advise people do a deal or two or three deals first where you syndicate them to prove the thesis and get some momentum, and make sure then you’ve got enough volume that you can justify the costs of setting up the fund, the organizational costs, the legal documents, all the setup and everything else before you made the leap to the pooled investment fund.
Michael Belasco (21:52):
Essentially, it’s like prove the thesis out, get one or two of these, which is what I’m hearing, make sure they work.
Matt Burk (22:00):
Exactly.
Michael Belasco (22:00):
The next piece is actually make sure that there’s enough out there to scale.
Matt Burk (22:04):
That’s right.
Michael Belasco (22:05):
I’m happy to open up. Well, I can tell you. I mean, we’re focused on RV parks around national parks. We’ve checked the box of demand far outweighs supply. Can we find these at attractive pricing? I’ve built a team that I would say… I think one of the biggest hurdles here if you’re not buying existing is getting these over the entitlement humps. I mean, first of all, a lot of these places are eight hours away from the next major airport, so you have to find a team that’s willing to go out there. They’re small teams.
The big hurdle in barrier entry is getting these things approved. Now, I think we have a team in place that can do that, and we’ve proved it once. We have our first deal up in Port Angeles, right outside of Olympic National Park. That’s going well. This will be the first deal, and we’re going to go out and syndicate. There’s conversation now that we may bring this to the larger Adventures in CRE audience, and potentially do it that way to create this momentum.
(23:07):
We’re going to try that here. We’ve looked at a couple other properties. Our question now that we have though, is the scalability. We wanted to do all development, but we’ve opened up more to the acquisitions. I think we have the team in place. I know we have the expertise in place. One of the hurdles though, is that it’s a new asset class.
Now, for our team, we have all the sophistication in the world around real estate investment and development on the team already, and we’re bringing in third-party management that has that experience. We’re on our first deal. We’re still raising LP capital for it. We’re fully approved and entitled. In my mind, I’m ready to go to that fund. I hear what you’re saying. In reality, I understand. It’s like you got to do one or two, but to somebody who’s ambitious like, “Hey, here’s the deal. This thing has legs. I’m coming to you. How do I quickly get this first LP money, and then how can I get to that next step?” Based on what you hear, so we’re curious.
Matt Burk (24:12):
Yeah. It would be a fascinating, and we should have the conversation offline. We’ll talk about all that because there’s a lot of thoughts there. I’ve done plenty of these where there’s entitlement risk. As you know, obviously, it’s like you buy something, how do you tie it up, get through the entitlements without spending a fortune and then ended up not being able to get the entitlements, then the property’s really not worth much of anything. That’s a risk. You’ve assessed all of those risks. The team, I think, in terms of when to set up the fund, that’s an individual choice. I’d say, Michael, I know a lot… I mean, I’m an entrepreneur. I have been my whole life. I hang out with entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs are believers and dreamers. They believe that they’re going to… They make things happen.
(24:59):
I think it just comes down to if you have the capitalization to do it, does it make sense to do the real estate fund earlier than you might otherwise, or do you want to test it? How much patience do people have? It’s an individual choice. There’s no magic answer. I would say, I’d at least do one or two deals and then make very sure that… Because when you set up the fund, you have to decide. Are you going to allow the real estate fund to invest in unentitled stuff? Because otherwise, how do you tie it up? Are you tying it up on the least offer for the minimal down and trying to minimize your costs so that if it doesn’t go, then you didn’t spend $1 million, you only spent $25,000?
Spencer Burton (25:45):
Yeah. Some form of a dead deal. There’s probably some form of a dead deal cost to your account.
Matt Burk (25:52):
I’d say a lot of funds would set it up where the fund is making those investments. Obviously, as the manager of the fund, you don’t want to have too many of those, because every one of those that happens drags down the yield of the ones that do perform, but all that’s part of… Even doing running pro forma. I mean, I find that people have a very difficult time running a fund financial model and projection of how that’s going to work. Because you think about it, the performance of the real estate fund is the combined performance of five, or 10, or 20, or 50 individual deals that happen at various points in time in various combinations. That’s not the same as one deal at a time.
(26:34):
There’s a lot of learning involved. I use this analogy a lot, is like running… When you learn math, you start at arithmetic. You can’t go from arithmetic to physics just straight away. You have to learn algebra and then calculus and then trigonometry. You work your way up. It’s the same thing in a fund. You just can’t graduate all the way to all the real estate fund concepts without working your way along the way. I try to encourage people, work your way along the way and you’ll get there eventually, but just making that jump straight away is incredibly difficult.
Spencer Burton (27:15):
Do you typically see managers who start out with… They do several prototype deals with friends and family or whatever syndication they do. Do you generally see them contributing those assets to a real estate fund and those early investors own an outsize share of the cashflow of the fund? Maybe even have a GP position in the fund? Is that how you typically see it?
Matt Burk (27:41):
I wouldn’t say typically, I’d say. But certainly yes, you do see that. There are pluses and minuses to that like there are with a lot of things. I mean, the pluses are, it’s not a complete blind pool fund. You’ve got some assets that you can already tell what the investors are. The biggest challenge is how do you treat the syndication investors fairly and the fund investors fairly in terms of the price that you’re acquiring it at?
Because as you guys know, what is the value of a piece of property? It’s what a willing buyer and a willing seller would pay. But when you’re on both sides of the trade, and you’re the manager of the buyer and you’re the manager of the seller, you got to be very careful about how you determine what that price is. It’s a conflict of interest, and you can disclose away that.
(28:28):
Legally, it’s fine to be able to do it, but it can be tricky to do that. You have to think about these investors that were in the syndication. Do they want to roll and are they willing to trade into the shares of the fund, or do they want to get paid out? If they need to get paid out, then you have to raise capital in the real estate fund to cover enough for the people that need to get paid out. The answer is yes, you could do it. I see it happen frequently, but it’s not that there are issues involved there that you got to think through.
Spencer Burton (28:57):
You generally recommend against it, it sounds like.
Matt Burk (29:00):
Not necessarily. I think it could be a good idea. Especially I’ve seen people that it’s their own money that they put into the deal in the first place. Well, in that case, well, you don’t want to be selling it. “Hey, I bought it for a million and I’m selling it to the real estate fund for 2 million. I’m putting a million in my pocket and my fund investors just paid way more than the property was really worth.” That’s the theoretical danger of doing that if you’re an investor.
But more often, Spencer, what I see are people who they’re trying to do right by their investors and they say, “Look, I paid a million. I think it’s worth 1,000,005 today, but I’ll sell it to the fund that a million want, because I’m giving the real estate fund a discount off of its current value.” People do it all the time. It’s a question of thinking through, making sure you have covered those conflicts of interest, and you’re thinking it through from both with your buyer hat and your seller hat on, if you’re representing investors on both sides of the trade.
Michael Belasco (29:58):
You could take that down to a development of getting a land entitled as a GP solo, and then you’re trying to raise capital. What’s that new landmark?
Matt Burk (30:06):
That’s right. Yeah, because you’ve got the bump in value based on the entitlement. How much is that?
Michael Belasco (30:13):
Even the perceived. Even if you think it’s fair and it is fair, there’s a perception that you have to get over.
Matt Burk (30:18):
That’s correct. That’s exactly right. Those are the issues when you’re trying to roll assets in that you are on both sides of the trade.
Spencer Burton (30:26):
We’re running low on time, but I want to get this question to Matt. A lot of the audience younger in the industry is entrepreneurial. But the new generation coming into the industry, Matt, and this is different from you and I, where we started, they go and they work for an institution for a decade and then they become an entrepreneur. To those though that have entrepreneurial ambitions. An open question for you, what advice would you offer them? Would you suggest that they go spend 10 years, cut their teeth? Would you suggest they jump right in on their own? What advice would you give to that young future entrepreneur getting into the industry right now?
Matt Burk (31:07):
I think people are just wired differently. I think the person who knows they’re an entrepreneur and knows that from a young age, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest spending 10 years in a larger institution. But for other more cautious people who really want to learn, I certainly think that’s a good way to do it. I mean, I jumped into it early on by happenstance, and it worked out okay for me.
(31:32):
But a lot of people these days, I feel like… I see them both ways. I see the entrepreneurs coming that are just an out-and-out entrepreneur from day one, and they were fixing and flipping houses when they were in their teens, and they just kept on doing their own thing all the way along, and they graduated at some point to a real estate fund. I’ve seen people coming out of big institutions that worked there for five or 10 years that cut their teeth, learned a ton, and now they’re going to go hang their own shingle.
(31:56):
But to the point that you made a little bit ago, there’s a lot of differences. I see them struggle sometimes just as much as the other person because they’re steeped in certain dogma that they learned right at an institutional level that may or may not apply to what they’re about to do as an entrepreneur. I don’t think there’s any one path that’s right for everybody. It can work either way, but I’d say just be cognizant. I always tell people, “Anything you do in life, you don’t know what you don’t know, so try to do the best you can to make sure you’re learning what you need to learn as you’re doing it so that you’re not wasting any more time or money than you have to.” That’s really what we try to help people with.
Spencer Burton (32:37):
I was going to say, that’s where you come in. For those who want to reach out to you, either to talk about their own fund or to meet you, what’s the best way for people to get ahold of you?
Matt Burk (32:47):
Yeah; my email is [email protected], no E on the end of Burk, so B-U-R-K. Or you can go onto our website, either fairwayamerica.com, which actually we’re in the process of redoing, so it’s a little bit dated, but we just launched a brand new website on our other company, which is probably the best place to go, is verivest.com. It’s V-E-R-I-V-E-S-T.com. It talks all about the funds, the whole advisory component, the component of the admin, the capital, et cetera.
Spencer Burton (33:17):
Great. Well, we’ll be sure to include those details in the summary of the video. Matt, thank you again for joining. I’ll turn it over to Sam to wrap us up. Sam, you’ve been quiet, by the way.
Sam Carlson (33:30):
It’s so funny, because as you guys are talking, I’m thinking to myself, how cool is it that, and this is maybe a little bit of a trailer for what’s coming on our next episode, probably the next episode following Matt’s or the one after that, is the announcement of season four of the Audio Series. When we started this, this was an audio series. We would do these in batches. We would get together, whether it was in Frisco, or Colorado Springs, or wherever it was.
(33:57):
This year, we did it onsite at the project that’s been discussed here. I was just thinking, how appropriate is this conversation and the timing? What I love about that, again, maybe as a little bit of a trailer, is we go nine or 10 episodes deep in this audio series, it’s so engaging in terms of the project, in terms of what’s happening now in real estate.
(34:22):
But my favorite episode, I don’t know how many episodes we’re in right now, but my favorite episodes, of all of the episodes, will be the final episode of season four, where I personally, and I got to do the same thing here, got to sit as a fly on the wall and watch people just discuss deal making and deal doing right in the heart of a deal. I got to play that role here a little bit. I don’t necessarily know a ton when it comes to creating a fund, but anyway. I just enjoyed the episode. I think the listeners did as well. If you’re excited for this one, wait until you hear season or watch season four, especially the last episode. You can’t just hear that one. You got to watch it. We will see you guys on the next episode.
Announcer (35:11):
Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. For show notes and additional resources, head over to www.adventuresincre.com/audioseries.
