Prashant Kumar, CCIM - Founder, MyRealtyGains

Prashant Kumar, CCIM – I know your journey has been very fruitful. I would like to know a little bit about your journey also so that people get motivated. I know we all talk about the benefits, share some of the highlights of your journey in the last couple of years. As you said, you started in 2018. This is a short span of three and a half, four years.

Zach Haptonstall – I was born and raised here in Phoenix, Arizona. I lived here my entire life. I grew up with kind of a lower-middle-class family. We don’t come from a lavish family. My parents had no background in Real Estate, nothing about it. I got a journalism degree, so I was a live news anchor, and sports reporter for Arizona PBS for a short time because I like sports. I wanted to be a sports reporter, and that was cool at first. Then I quickly realized that I hated it because you don’t make enough money. You work crazy hours. It’s very political. I was like, I don’t want to do this. I was like, I need to make money because I have student debt, right? then I try to focus on how can I make the most money to get rid of my debt and become more financially established? 

I went into healthcare marketing, working for a hospice organization, of all things. Just something I kind of fell into. I worked as a marketer, worked my way up to a director of marketing, and then ultimately became president and co-owner of a large hospice organization here in Phoenix. We had 110 employees. I got my MBA and all the things that we just talked about. I was thinking, of getting the degree, continuing to advance, and getting a high W2 salary. But even as I was advancing, I was very blessed and fortunate to pay off my student debt and buy a house by the time I was 23, I was making 150K plus a year. 

I was 26, I’m making 200K plus a year, making more money than both my parents combined. But I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt like I was kind of stuck, and I hit a ceiling. So January 2018, I resigned and sold my equity in that company. I had no plan. I said, I just want to somehow create Passive Income through Real Estate, but I don’t know how I’m going to do it. And so I lived off in savings for well over a year, just burning through cash.

And I was trying to figure out, how do I make money through Real Estate? I didn’t want to be a Real Estate agent. At first, I was looking at flipping homes, and I realized that’s just transactional. I don’t want to do that. Then I learned about mobile home parks. I started cold calling mobile home park owners. I tried to buy one on a seller’s carry. I had almost three hundred K of cash that I had just relentlessly saved the previous four years with that high W2 job following the Dave Ramsay plan. I got a good bump of cash from selling my equity in that company but I was living off of this cash and had no income, and I was just burning through it, paying a mortgage, monthly costs, etcetera. 

Well, finally I started to discover multifamily and as I said, I started listening to podcasts just like yours, reading books, started going to conferences, and I learned the power of multifamily investing in what we call syndication, where you raise money from passive investors. And so that’s when I kind of went forward and decided I want to build this syndication Real Estate platform. I met a couple of partners, and we bought our first deal together. That went well, and then we started raising money from passive investors. So since then, we’ve been very fortunate. And since then we’ve acquired 31 different properties, all here in the Phoenix Metro, worth over $1 billion, over 5000 units. We’ve had nearly 2000 different individual investors. Now we have a couple of different companies, we have a property management company, we have our real estate company, and we have over 100 plus full-time employees on full benefits. So we’ve been very fortunate. But it took me 14 months from when I quit that job to close on the first property. So the first 14 months were just a lot of adversity. And even after I bought the first three or four properties, I wasn’t making any money.

You don’t make any money the first two and a half, three years. There’s a lot of adversity to go through. But just in the last 18-24 months, we caught our momentum and make it very successful and lucrative and very fortunate.

That’s kind of my story is that just kind of dove right into it. It took a lot of time to kind of break in, but now we’re firsthand experiencing the results and the benefits of investing in real estate.

Prashant Kumar, CCIM – Well, you guys have heard it right. Leaving a $200,000 job and not doing anything, not earning anything for 14 months, and then starting the business, acquiring the first property after 14 months, and getting into a couple of properties. The first couple of years, I would say two years, two and a half years. Jack did not make any money, but persistence pays off.

Paid off, right?

I mean, now, as you said, in the last 18 months, your portfolio has grown up to $1 billion and you have 100 employees. If you are in a W two job for the last four years, maybe you would have made 200,000. You would have jumped to 250,000 at most, right?

That’s the maximum that could have happened. I mean, in your w job, you don’t get paid exponentially. You just get paid, like 4% 5%, which doesn’t even meet your inflation.