Taylor Avakian
what's going on right now and what do you think that's going to do for
February 18, 2025 · 1 hr 11 min
Housing Crises & Market Cycles: A Deep Dive with Nick Halaris
With Nick Halaris — Real Estate Investor & Thought Leader
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What this conversation gets into
In this episode of No Vacancy, host Taylor Avakian sits down with real estate investor and thought leader Nick Halaris to discuss the shifting landscape of real estate.
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Episode show notes
In this episode of No Vacancy, host Taylor Avakian sits down with real estate investor and thought leader Nick Halaris to discuss the shifting landscape of real estate. From LA’s housing crisis to the impact of inflation, political uncertainty, and rising insurance costs, Nick shares his expert insights on where the market is headed. He also dives into long-term investment strategies, urban development trends, and the evolving role of AI in real estate. Never miss an episode! Subscribe on your preferred platform and rate our show ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: 🍏Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-vacancy-with-taylor-avakian/id1768889293🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0mqgyJK00yivmqfH8zzLQW?si=f5ab2abbbe734fd7&nd=1&dlsi=5a2d156924c747fb 📈 Connect with me: Website: https://www.thegroupcre.com/ Email: taylor@thegroupcre.com X: https://x.com/TAYVAY_ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tayloravakian/ #RealEstatePodcast #HousingMarket #LosAngelesRealEstate #RealEstateInvesting #EconomicTrends #UrbanDevelopment #MarketTrends #RealEstateStrategy #RealEstateTech #PropTech #InvestmentInsights #BuildingWealth #MultifamilyDevelopment #affordablehousing
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Episode transcript
This 13,311-word transcript is matched to English (Original) automatic captions. Timestamps seek the episode player to the matching passage.
0:00–10:00
Nick Halaris
the city of La 2025 is setting up to be a nasty year for real estate in this town in particular things have changed mhm and I think we're going to see almost a you know complete reversal I think 20% increase is on the table basically the city's fire chief said the conditions are unprecedented unpredictable and that there was no possibility of bringing them
Taylor Avakian
under control everything that has occurred with the displacement and the lack of this construction of housing that it's going to change completely from
Nick Halaris
a pricing perspective I think both actually I think that going into the fires there was like a really weird dynamic in La I hadn't seen in in my 20 years of doing this rather than having a disaster 2025 La is going to feel like it it's like a bull market because of this wild shift in supply and demand Dynamics as these wildfires rip through Los Angeles County new fears of more homeowners insurance Price hikes that could be spread across the state and is actually a really sad story for La for the exact reason you mentioned all angelinos are going to face incredible increases in their insurance here's what I think America will eventually be forced to do it's basically the only
Taylor Avakian
option welcome to no vacy where I share conversations with LA's top multif family owners investors and Visionaries I'm your host Taylor ven the founder of the group SI and I specialize in the sale of apartment buildings in Los Angeles on this show we cut straight to what matters Market insights and real world strategies straight from LA's multif family icons to help you navigate one of the most complex real estate markets in the world Southern California enjoy welcome to the podcast my name is Taylor Von uh No Vacancy and today we have a special guest and it's not only special because he has his own podcasts and newsletter and incredible real estate operator and owner but because this is our third time trying to film this episode The First Time Nick came in here and uh he had just come over a little cold and was dealing with
Taylor Avakian
some Voice issues and like we couldn't it was it was bad he couldn't we couldn't talk then the second time we turned to film this uh I came down with a sickness and we had to cancel the day before and so now finally we're both here and we're healthy and we're good and we're excited about to talk about some things and there's a lot of pertinent things a lot of timely things that I think I saw Nick's newsletter that he posted today about what's going on with the LA fires and you have some thoughts on that and so I want to before we get into like the background and all the fun stuff in real estate like what what's going on right now and what do you think that's going to do for the city of La yeah
Nick Halaris
we definitely need to talk about it first of all thanks for having me on the show hopefully we get through this time um I've I've done a lot of these kinds of shows and I've never had it where I could I lost my voice basically in the middle so that was uh interesting but here we are a month later it's actually I think the timing is actually slightly better yeah uh because a month ago my base case what I was going to was what I was prepared to tell you a month ago was that 2025 was setting up to be a nasty year for real estate in this town in particular my forecast was for you know long listings massive rental concessions maybe a 20% price decline in in residential and and multi uh and my
Nick Halaris
my theory was based on you know weakness I saw in the economy and the fact that you know they the FED hasn't quite won the battle on inflation and now man it's uh things have changed mhm and I think we're going to see almost a you know complete reversal I think 20% increas is on the table basically wow so it's a it's a huge swing for you know for people who are fortunate enough to
Taylor Avakian
not have been impacted by the fire obviously of course but on a on a broader scale so why do you think that first of all what were the the signals that made you think that the prices and values and
Nick Halaris
things are going to come down yeah we had we had experienced a very challenging 2024 the it's what's funny about real estate stats is that if you sort of studied like the headline numbers about you know rental inflation in La it painted a picture that it was a good year like oh we had a modest increase 3% increase or something like that but on the ground that that wasn't true at all MH and people were giving away massive concessions you know two to four months in some cases and even having tenants with leases turning over and negotiate for discounts and so we were seeing outright deflation in rental prices in LA in the in the in the range of 20% in my view just based on the data that I have and these are multi homes or what it was everything in everything that
Nick Halaris
I have sort of exposure to which is Homes and Apartments of of any size you know a lot a lot of my friends who have sort of in tional size products were reporting the same thing wow which begs another question which this isn't a subject for this podcast but yeah the fact that that data didn't make it into the sort of official information is beyond me but yeah last year was a disaster and there was nothing on the horizon to suggest that that's going to get any better in 2025 because Hollywood is still sort of struggling as I mentioned earlier the the the battle against inflation is far from over and we have you know a lot of political turmoil uh going into the end of last year that you know half half of the Trump platform is inflationary and the other half is maybe even potential to cause a
Nick Halaris
recession right if you fire a bunch of government employees uh so it's just a weird picture so that that was why my
Taylor Avakian
base case was so low and then now with what's happening there's I don't know the exact number but somewhere between 5 to 7,000 I believe homes um and then 15 to you know 15 or so thousand structures and buildings and and things like that like 756 units I think the Palisades burned down for apartment units so that's a lot of displacement so you feel like with everything that has occurred with the displacement and the lack of um the destruction of housing that it's going to change completely from a pricing perspective do you feel that way because of the incomes of the level of the people whose houses were destroyed or do you feel like that from an actual
Nick Halaris
Supply demand perspective both I think both actually I think that going into the fires there was like a really weird dynamic in La something that I hadn't seen in in my 20 years of doing this where there was a glut of single family houses relatively high-end that were vacant for rent M and that's a function of you know maybe there was too much spec development going on you know in the go go days of zero zero interest rate but also um the fact that the housing market the for sale housing market was essentially broken and it's still broken you know the what do you mean by that it there's there's just with mortgage rates where they are at 7% nothing in America is Affordable in this town nothing was affordable when interest rates were zero and so now that the the mortgage you
Nick Halaris
can get is in the sevens it's like a non-starter and so what that led to is that a bunch of people who may have wanted to sell their properties in 20124 couldn't sell them and so they had them on the market to for lease and what's happened already in 10 days or so like a lot of that supply is getting taken up by you know wealthier families impacted by the Palisades fire for example but we're seeing it at all price points and actually we're seeing signs that sort of make me optimistic about the response to the fires from the insurance companies because I I thought you know three or four days ago I was like you know what these insurance companies are going to be shady and they're going to make it really hard for people to get leases but we're helping a friend lease a house
Nick Halaris
uh not too far from here in Sherman Oaks at a decent price point but not like this crazy you know $30,000 type thing it's maybe more like a five or $6,000 place and the insurance companies is on it communicative is signing up for the auto auto pay on the rent in all in like a 24-hour period so wow gives me a hope that maybe you know for the people who are fortunate enough to at least have insurance yeah that they're they're not going to find it impossible to rent places did you know anyone who didn't have insurance no not personally okay yeah but I've heard that the numbers are like greater than 10% is the
Taylor Avakian
estimate someone I just saw a video of a real estate agent like a TV real estate agent say that 50% he thinks they have divid insurance and I'm like oh my gosh yeah the average price point in the Palisades was $4.5 million or something like that and if you didn't have insurance and not to say that you know they didn't have wealth out of their places but for a lot of people their home is one of their biggest assets and if you bought a property in 1980 and now it's worth 4 million bucks like maybe you you bought it for 300 400 Grand like yeah you may not be the guy who's bringing in a couple million dollars a year you just happen to buy a property in a good location and the appreciation happened so that's right it's I'm very interested to see how it affects because the
Taylor Avakian
the mass market in terms of pricing so and what I mean by that is because when the challenge that we've had in underwriting and working with Apartments is that the expenses have gone up crazy over the last three to five years probably like starting 2022 expenses started to shoot up uh Insurance went up like crazy utilities went up like crazy um a lot of these habitability claims were happening
10:00–20:00
Taylor Avakian
like it was very difficult to keep up with the rising expenses for apartment owners now that insurance is uh there's a huge loss from these insurance companies in terms of the damage 5060 billion something like that I guess is what people are saying how is that going to affect the greater market in terms of the insurance because if you have to underwrite $1,000 a unit or you were underwriting $1,000 a unit on your property and now you're new insurance is $2,000 per unit or 2500 bucks per unit like yeah that doesn't make the numbers work very well
Nick Halaris
yeah it's a great point it's actually something that I wrote about in my My article today where right now like rather than having a disaster 2025 La is going to feel like it it's like a bull market because of this wild shift in supply and demand Dynamics but the end is actually a really sad story for La for the exact reason you mentioned all Angelina are going to face incredible increases in their insurance and so once again La is going to become more expensive to live in like the mega trend of our lifetime is essentially fully intact and what's what's crazy about it is is that a month ago had we recorded this podcast a month ago I was ready to talk about how man this is the first time in 40 years when La has the potential to sort of be
Nick Halaris
a normal Market where supply and demand and macro forces the prices to actually Decline and I don't think we see that in 25 but it is a potential for future years because of this insurance unless the federal government comes up with some kind of program or the you know in combination with the state angelinos at who own every type of property are going to have trouble with this and it's going to have I I don't exactly know what the the damage is going to be yet but it's going to be substantial jeez man that's
Taylor Avakian
crazy how do you guys have any um vacancies in your apartments or you're pretty leased up with longer
Nick Halaris
term tenants so we we had some vacancies uh they're all full now okay they F filled instantly one bed two beds three beds we had we had a house okay we there like a four bedroom as a square foot house we had a couple buildings a couple apartment units like condo units we were managing for some friends the house in Sherman Oaks I mention yeah and then uh those all filled and we're in this weird unique position where we have have some new construction buildings that are about to get CFO oh and so the you know mayor bass just passed this emergency directive which I I really appreciate and like and I hope they the city actually follows through on it but we have two buildings that qualify as like Hey we're going to help you get your CF really fast instead of take forever
Nick Halaris
so I'm GNA we're going to see how that plays out interesting so they're like Fast tracking some yeah they they have a whole series like of measures that they supposedly are going to do to FasTrack the getting units online and uh I am I'm I'll look forward to reporting back because on that one my base case was you know based on prior prior experience from 2024 these projects are at the a point in the process where we're looking at like 90 days because of just like really just ridiculous City processing yeah so it was going to be a 90day wait and uh we'll see if the emergency
Taylor Avakian
director itive changes at wow what is um just to give people some context what is your exposure and what exposure I mean by that is like what do you own in Los Angeles and then what does the real estate holdings look like right now
Nick Halaris
for just for metros Capital yeah yeah we own a portfolio of houses and small apartment buildings apartment buildings ranging from everything from um four plexes to 18 units here locally and then we own um some buildings back in Atlanta that we acquired in what feels like a very long time ago in the in the early 2010s yeah uh that are much bigger
Taylor Avakian
so these are like 300 unit plus type buildings got it okay and then um on the front of those CFO buildings that you're building is that with metros or is that a different that's with Metro as well yeah so you guys got into the multif family development space I assume
Nick Halaris
well five years ago four years ago with yeah just sad but true yeah sad but true yeah we most of my career is buying existing properties but right around 2016 2017 the combination of factors had created a circumstance all across the country really where it was really difficult to make the acquisition of existing assets to make any sense because you know the FED had suppressed interest rates for a long time and so there was this Global hunt for yield and apartments got bit up to where they didn't make any sense you know they they haven't really made sense in LA in a long time but this spread out through the whole country we we experienced it even in Atlanta so like all uh entrepreneurial real estate people we went out on the risk curve a little bit we're like okay
Nick Halaris
well if we can't buy anything maybe we'll try to build something from ground up and so we had a series of projects not that many only like five of them they have all taken way too long yeah cost way too much money and um going into you know this year I thought we were going to struggle to lease them up I thought they'd take forever to get their CFO I thought we struggle to lease them but that might not be the case
Taylor Avakian
now interesting man it's it's so strange to see the changes that occur these kind of blacks SW events and how they shift or FasTrack like with with covid too right like that shifted a whole thing it basically fast-tracked a bunch of things from work to home to the office market crash to yeah a lot of these real estate things that were inevitable felt like eventually it but it just streamlined it significantly so I'm curious to know if in LA and I talked to AR last week um or a few weeks ago on about how he thinks and he hopes that this fast tracking this process that the the city government is is trying to do right now to help a lot of these homeowners is something that they can keep and maintain and allow this to be
Taylor Avakian
a a CA use case of like this is how it should be done right this is how we can actually get [bleep] done when we need to instead of doing it once in an emergency State and then oh we're going to go back to old ways of taking 17 years to uh build any affordable units or any apartment units or anything like that yeah so it's it's going to be super interesting to see um from that perspective do you feel like right now that the growth in the economy and from a macroeconomic standpoint I know Trump's coming in um do you think that's going to shift the markets or or what do you think an impact that's going to have on a a macro level as someone who owns an Atlant and is someone who owns in Los Angeles yeah I want to answer
Nick Halaris
that question because I'm fascinated by I've been thinking about a lot but before that your your friend Ari has a good point like this moment in time to me is it's almost funny it's it's not funny though because of what it has meant for Californians for 30 years but basically what all across the state at every level of government uh you've seen people come out with emergency directives essentially saying well you don't have to do XYZ all this stuff and the truth is that could have been done at any moment and that this is all some stuff that we've imposed upon ourselves and the the CR the critics of local government and the development process in La for the last 20 or 30 years have been hammering this like this is self-imposed and yes we do care about the environment and yes we care
Nick Halaris
about creating safe places and having appropriate um working conditions and all these things these These are important priorities that we can't just throw out but there's a bunch of things that we can throw out and we're throwing them out as we speak because there's a bigger priority which is hey we need we need to get people in houses and so I hope that this moment in time is a moment where angelinos in particular can reflect upon the priorities that are out there and and and maybe go a different direction because what we've been doing is so obviously not working and everyone knows about it but everyone no one seems to want to like step up even even the politicians who've attempted sort of run against the consensus have been really like safe when someone kind of needs to come in and say listen none of
Nick Halaris
this stuff makes any sense let me explain to you why we're going to throw it all out and he do something different um and and part of me thinks that we might actually see that in response to the fires because there's a lot of angry people no one's going to forget this fire and there's 12,000 people are never going to forgive right all these people who suffered you know loss in such an intimate way you know when you when you lose everything you've ever owned in an instant like that changes your you
Taylor Avakian
I'm sure I yeah I want to come back to the question I asked previously but to to bring that up it's a note of it almost feels like um and I don't know his policies at all right I I I know what he does and I'm but Rick Caruso had a pretty moving speech I'd say um because his house was him and his daughters and his family's houses were burned and it almost makes sense for me from an actual incentives perspective where someone who doesn't need to climb the the governmental ladders he's this dude's a billionaire like he doesn't need to run for government he could live a happy life if he wanted to but he wants to for Change and maybe there's ego stuff involved whatever right Donald Trump you could say the same thing but like
Taylor Avakian
his incentives are not to get to a place where then he can make a bunch of money like he's already made a bunch of
20:00–30:00
Taylor Avakian
money and he has business acument so I'm curious to know if uh if someone like that who's incentives are aligned with actually making the city better because it not only makes his products better but makes everything better for the the community that he's grown up and and built like I wonder if it needs someone like that in there who who doesn't need to appease the votes of everyone and try to make everything you know make everyone happy to to get to the next level it's like he doesn't really need to get to the next level he's not incentivized to that so that's that's going to be interesting um to see because I've already been you know I know where a lot of real estate people lean in in their perceptions but I don't think a lot of people are happy with
Taylor Avakian
the way that the the current government previously was handling it um they're obviously trying to do a lot to improve that now but it's it's going to be interesting to see what happens I
Nick Halaris
I agree like I don't know if Caruso is the right candidate for you the job or for the for the mission that that is in this town he he may there's a lot of things that he probably would do better than an establishment politician for example but the the what the focus in my view is we need someone who's willing to place efficiency and effectiveness at the core of the platform instead of for lack of a better way of describing it instead of like a virtue signaling or a I'm not I'm not virtue signaling is not a right word because it's too negative you know I wrote about this in in the article this week as well where Los Angeles is a really interesting place because the citizens have been super generous with respect to
Nick Halaris
the progressive agenda and so we've been consistently voting for very Progressive benevolent policies to support everything from the environment to homelessness to the even Criminal Justice Reform for a period of time we've turned our backs on that obviously in in recent times and along the way we've completely forgotten or lost focus of the truth which is that in order to care for our fellow citizens we actually need to be operating from a position of strength and we we don't have that we don't have the financial resources we don't have the systems and processes we we don't have the you know the leadership and foresight in in the halls of government and so I feel like if there's a switch whether it's Kusa or not that's the platform that I feel like angelinos
Nick Halaris
in this moment in time would be interested in which is like Hey listen let's put politics aside for a minute and let's even put the discussion about the agenda to the side I someone could say I support all that but let's do it when we have actual resources CU if you don't have any resources what are we talking about yeah we're just going to do a bunch of half you know half baked things and uh so I'm I'm curious to see how the politics evolve from this moment just based on that I kind of feel like
Taylor Avakian
this could be a turning point the focus there needs to be a focus and people need to not try to do a million in one things and it's it's true I see it in my business too it's like you try to do everything and you end up getting nothing done yeah so there needs to be this Focus this priority in terms of actually solving the main issues the one big thing and then we'll figure that the next big thing and then we'll figure out the next big thing but it's kind of the Elon Musk philosophy of like find a constraint fix the constraint then move on to the next constraint yeah right yeah and and
Nick Halaris
refusing to refusing to put your head in the sand about things that aren't working and so you know this this happened a lot in La where and and angelinos keep actually voting even though the things like homelessness is a good example for example La the population has been incredibly supportive of very compassionate policies which I support I think they're all in well-intentioned policies but the problem just keeps getting worse and I think what is going to take on an issue like that is a politician like I'm describing come out and said listen these are people that need our help but here's what it takes to help them and not sugarcoated don't hide behind it like someone need to come out and say the real number the real number is like 50 billion or something and we need to build shelter spaces at
Nick Halaris
this rate in this time frame but everyone even Caruso when he ran Caruso ran the reason he lost in my opinion yeah is he ran on sort of like a a Half Baked plan of building 36,000 shelter beds or something like that when he really just should have said we're going all in on shelters like New York and here's what it's going to cost and here's why it's worth it that message would have resonated better than the one he came out with in my view um no I get that I totally get that I think people are fed up
Taylor Avakian
to with this kind of fake fakeness I think that's why Trump uh actually won and I don't want to get too political but like yeah people want realness now they're over this fake [bleep] of just covering it up with this you know RI hand speech written stuff and they want the real person and I think from a bunch of political figures being on podcast and actually seeing to get the real to really know them and get to see them as a person and who they are that feels like where we're headed as a society is let's let's see the real you like what do you really can't care and stand for we don't we don't trust the the facade that a lot of people were putting up we want to see what the realness is um at least for my generation it feels like that's that's the case so we're
Taylor Avakian
we're headed for a a very interesting um you know decade and a half especially with technology AI all that kind of crazy stuff the world is going to the last 100 years is going to change in the next 10 it's it's going to be really
Nick Halaris
interesting it is and and it's everybody sort of knows that and that's why people are feeling so uncomfortable and throwing in like natural disasters that keep happening we're in wars and it makes people really uncomfortable
Taylor Avakian
absolutely to get back to the uh macroeconomic question right Atlanta uh you own some properties Tennessee I think you said you own some properties um in Los Angeles what is your macroecon IC view on where we're headed and in the current landscape and in regards to real estate and
Nick Halaris
the markets yeah it's it's really hard to say and I think there's sort of two things that are worth considering when trying to answer this question the first one is what is the Fed going to do and what what can the FED really do and we're in this sort of unprecedented period where the FED is sort of declaring Victory on inflation but we're still 50% above the target so the latest inflation reading was like close to three and the fed's official targets to so we're 50% above and we cut rates but the bond market basically erased the cut by moving completely in the other direction and so the market doesn't believe that inflation is done we have an an incoming president who has a history of sort of being combative with the fed and and maybe even CH willing
Nick Halaris
to challenge the independence of the FED who thinks the interest rates are too high but the market is kind of saying the opposite right that we need uh and I think the inflation question it's it's hard to say where it's going to me it feels like all of the risk is to the upside right like oil could go up insurance is going up like there's just so many things that are the most likely price move from here is to go up mhm with one caveat the Chinese economy is sort of the driver of growth MH it has been for 20 years especially in sort of the commodity sector and they're really struggling and they're having a lot of deflationary pressure and China could export that deflationary pressure to the rest of the world and it would be good it would actually be a savior kite type
Nick Halaris
moment for the West because the West needs inflation to go back to two MH otherwise they they have a sort of unsustainable uh fiscal balance sheets yeah uh so that's the one that's the Fed so the FED has got this inflation problem it has an interest rate problem and then you have the Trump agenda which is confusing it's it's on the one hand it's it's sort of exciting in the sense that you know are we really going to try to deregulate America and and improve business conditions and on the other hand it's like doesn't make any sense because because tariffs are instantly inflationary and if he if he's going to do it to the extent that which he says he's going to do it I don't think you will because it it honestly would be devastating to the American economy and it would the FED would absolutely
Nick Halaris
have to raise rates because it's instantly inflationary and then you have this other weird thing where you have the excitement around Doge the problem with doge is that you can't really execute it uh without blowing up the deficit and so here's the conundrum so yeah basically to execute Doge because of the way that the budget is structured Doge real quick the department of governmental efficiency this is like the Vic ramaswami and Elon Musk we're going to we're going to find you know $2 trillion do of savings in the federal budget by looking at all the waste yeah and let me be clear there's absolutely waste I'm in the camp that there's a lot of waste but the the budget structure of the government is not that
30:00–40:00
Nick Halaris
flexible you got Medicare you've got interest on the debt you've got the defense budget and then you have all this other stuff and so is anyone going to cut Medicare and Social Security highly unlikely are they going to cut the defense budget highly unlikely so now we're talking about the sort of alphabet soup of all the agencies the SEC the FDA and the Department of Labor and these places are wildly inefficient there's no question about it but there's 3 million employees and so like all the head count like all the efficiency things that you see in Corporate America at the end of the day what it is is they fire people and so okay what are we're going to fire a million people from the federal payroll well that causes a recession in this country and if you look back at the last three or four recessions in every
Nick Halaris
single instance the fiscal deficit expanded by over 500 basis points and so it's contrary to the plan m like you get because you're you're essentially going to lower tax receipts you're GNA cause a shock a recessionary shock which is going to cause tax receipts to come down and then you're going to get even bigger deficit and so doge is kind of it's a weird a weird thing to be excited about because I I don't see how you could do it and actually achieve the deficit reduction that they're trying to achieve what is a
Taylor Avakian
way that this problem can be solved because it seems like it's a death spiral if we're with which is like you know you make money but then your expenses are higher and then the more you make money you have to make more money on top of that to then pay for the expenses like what what is your opinion on a
Nick Halaris
possible solution so here here's what I think America will eventually be forced to do it's basically the only option is they're going to have to get into a recession and cut race to the floor and they're going to have to try to refinance the entire federal debt and at as low of interest rate as possible and maybe even just have the fed by the debt mhm that's what they probably should have done during the covid era when race were at the floor is they should have extended the term of a lot of the debt and you know because 30-year was I don't remember how low the 30-year got but it was really low yeah and instead they sort of kept doing what they were normally doing which is they do a lot of short-term issuance they do 10 years and even shorter and now you know the
Nick Halaris
the one-year rate is 5% or something and they could have locked in 30-year debt yeah in the co era at at like three or less and so I think that's what they're going to be forced to do like you want to reduce the deficit you have to reduce the interest on the debt and the only way to do that is through some sort of uh Innovative quasi illegal action like let's do quantitative easing and monetize the debt yeah and I think it's a complicated enough Financial transactions that that everyone around the world is essentially doing so maybe we could get away with it yeah but ultimately it's it's not great for the long term because you're basically creating money and then using fake money to buy it yeah it can't be good for the the system in the whole
Taylor Avakian
you um you strike me as someone who's very well versed in in this like a lot of things right you have a very nuanced approach to it I've I've read your newsletter and there's there's a lot of nuances to you there's some spiritual aspects to you there's obviously some economic aspects to you some political aspects some some investment real estate aspects to you so like why is that why do you are you tell me a little bit about how that came to be yeah and what drives you to want to be curious and and learn all these different aspects of
Nick Halaris
it yeah that's a tough question but I I've actually been thinking about it lately because I was going back and just thinking about my career and even how I got into real estate like I think the best way to the best way I can summarize it is that I've always been interested in Freedom that was what I was sort of really interested in when I got into real estate I had had one or two jobs in my life after you know doing doing really well in school and stuff like that and for something for me something about the um the idea of like being chained to a death ask or whatever it just like really bothered me I hated it actually and I was originally attracted to real estate because it looked like a place where I could have like an enormous amount of personal freedom which is
Nick Halaris
what I was interested in and it was only recently that I realized the truth which is that of why I wanted you know the the freedom is that I I am really curious I'm until actually interested in a lot of areas and even I I even think back to my early days as a as a real estate investor I would I was flipping houses in um South La and I was living in West Hollywood so I did a lot of driving and what I did you know during that those years is I I like consumed an enormous amount of lecture series for example like I downloaded like there's this company that's still around it's called the teaching company or the Great Courses or something like that and I listen to like hundreds of lecture series on anything that I was interested in cuz I was just driving around
Nick Halaris
going to job site to job site and I would get to the job ites and you know do what I had to do go talk to the construction people or whatever or talk to the agents if I was try to get a deal but I was really just learning in like following following like I guess what I would call my true passion which is to engage with like all sorts of different things you know I'm interested in a lot and I'm interested in you know continuing to advance my knowledge of things and and now in recent years to share with other people which is why I started writing and why I started doing the podcast because I realized I actually had a lot to say I felt like saying it yeah yeah
Taylor Avakian
you've you've you've had many years of soaking up so much different information different experiencing different uh parts of the economy different businesses and that that level of experience I think is something that not a lot of people necessarily get to understand and what the traditional path is go to school get a good job work your job and you know work there for 35 years 40 years years and retire and then you know do your thing raise your kids whatever it seems like over the last decade maybe decade and a half there's been this shift towards more um freedom to more entrepreneurship to more creating your own wealth burning your own path and it it seems like you were on that path pretty early um from just what your path has been your story do you feel like we're headed to a
Taylor Avakian
place where that continues to be the case and and people try to be more
Nick Halaris
independent and and find their freedom I think so I think we live in a very unique time in history where because of all this technology and and the incredible sophistication of our economy like you can you can live a pretty amazing life doing kind of what you want to do what you like and that is unique because many for most generations of humanity there were little outlets and in many cases you had little choice in those Outlets there's only so much you could do there was you'd be born into situations and then you could never get out of them and we live in this incredible time where you can especially in country like this you can you can go and do what you want and not only that you can make a lot of money doing it like yeah basically do anything and make money these days
Nick Halaris
uh there's a dark side to that like the the internet has created some crazy stuff but um it's undeniable that it's the opportunity is there yeah you can be you could have the strangest thing that you're interested in and it could turn into a business which um is unique and exciting and interesting what's
Taylor Avakian
what's the next thing that you're curious what's your C current curiosity following right now yeah that's
Nick Halaris
an interesting question I think I'm really enjoying this phase of my life I have young kids they're nine and seven and so I'm I'm enjoying spending a lot of time with them and and being part of their upbringing and and their life and their Sports and their activities and stuff but in the back of my mind I I sort of see myself evolving in the direction of some kind of Public Service I I don't exactly know how that looks I'm I'm enjoying being a writer you know and building my newsletter we have something like 20,000 people across the world reading it now wow which has been really cool um and and it's free so people can sign up for free include the link it's called profit plus and you can just Google my name and it's sign up for nickis yeah and then same with
Nick Halaris
the podcast uh but I I've I've sort of come to a conclusion that that like I'm not I'm not in it to just make money and financial returns you know when I was younger I thought you know back to to bring it back to the freedom conversation when I was younger I thought that I wanted money because of the freedom that it could provide and there's some truth to that like don't get me wrong like in America or any it's better to have money than not have money it really is and and anyone who tells you differently is is not telling you the truth yeah like I really believe that in this day and age you have to win in financial life if you don't you severely limit your your opportunity set and uh so you need money but what I learned along the way is
Nick Halaris
that what makes for a better or the ideal sort of life lifestyle is when you have a sense
40:00–50:00
Nick Halaris
of purpose along with that so like yeah go for sure pursue your financial success take care of your family do the things that you have to do but if you can get that that purpose mixed into it then all of a sudden waking up every day is like a different it has a different feeling and and that's what I've been getting with the writing and the podcasting and so I feel like I'm I'm almost certainly going to evolve more in that direction and I see my my future in the on the the business side is you know mentoring young people who are interested in doing it and in hopefully investing alongside them yeah that's part of the thing I want to do I've have I have some really good people on my team that I've been mentoring for years that are now kind of
Nick Halaris
running things and I I'd love to do more of that because amazing I think yeah I think it would be super fun like an incubator exactly like a real estate
Taylor Avakian
incubator yeah incubating Talent what uh do you have any examples of um that you can share of people who you've mentored in what some of the cool things
Nick Halaris
they're doing now yeah like uh actually my one of my partners in metros Capital nick fenmore uh he's started working for me he has a super interesting background he was a DJ W yeah and uh dropped out of college basically because he do that life uh but then eventually found me uh through some random and he's been working with me and my partner John Young for years and in recent years has basically be become a partner of the business wow um he's done really well and become honestly Nick Filmore is probably the best um house flipper in Los Angeles dang yeah and there's it's high phrase and this is a town where there's house slippers yeah but I would put fenmore up against anybody wow yeah uh but we're also doing a lot more sophisticated stuff as
Nick Halaris
well like we we starting a lending business together that he's kind of leading the charge of um that one's called Westward Capital we just starting that this year okay and uh we're still going to do stuff together at metros um but we
Taylor Avakian
have so then yeah I'm curious because you've seen a lot of people you've mentored a lot of people what makes what makes what skill set what habits what things actually make someone successful from that perspective or be able to actually get from not Financial Freedom or passion freedom to getting to that point like what do what do people have to do to get to where they
Nick Halaris
their dreams yeah I think uh it's different in different Industries but what I know just cuz I really have spent all my time in real estate real estate is a place where to be successful you essentially need like a couple character traits all of which you could develop but it helps if you sort of have them to begin with you have like an ankling of them one is a unusual degree and willingness to engage in proactive Behavior so like real estate is the wild west it always has been it doesn't matter where you enter real estate but if you enter it in an entrepreneurial fashion like I did like hey I want to flip houses mhm that exercise is requires an unusual amount of productivity like there's no Playbook you have to call people you have to
Nick Halaris
find deals you have to meet people you have to find construction Crews you have to do all this stuff and there's absolutely no Road mapping so to do it well you have to be proactive uh so that's one number two is uh this is a frame uh a phrase that I got from another friend of mine a mentor friend who's a phenomenal one of the best if not the best real estate investor that I've ever met but he refuses to do anything in public fair enough but this is his phrase It's called um Relentless followup so basically I think we're brothers yeah it's similar it's similar to the proactivity but it Relentless followup is about just like refusing to leave something to chance it's just like if something needs to get done I'm
Nick Halaris
going to do what I can do put it in the other person's court and I'm going to make sure that whatever needs to happen happens yeah and it's really a true statement like in this business I'm actually super curious to know whether it's a problem in other businesses but in our world in real estate if you don't engage in Relentless followup you will lose it that is so funny you say
Taylor Avakian
that because um that is my business my business is Relentless followup if the Brokerage in the in the definition uh in the dictionary excuse me the definition should be relentless followup because that is the only way things get done and it what's very nuanced about it too is because everyone knows that person who's annoying right and it's this balance of following up and not being annoying and it's hard it's really hard to do because um you need something or you're trying to give something and there's this there's this challenge this this block between actually getting what needs to be done what someone's goals are what their plans are and then come mingling them and and making it actually 1+ 1 equals 3 kind of situation but it's it's continuous I I there's you don't
Taylor Avakian
know how many times I think one of the first big deals one of the first bigger deals that I did and the initial conversation started four years prior to anything actually happening and that was just a continuous connection hey value at hey checking in hey comp's here hey sales comps here like it is so much of there's I can smell it there's something there right and I know that I can have value in the situation I just need to be there throughout time so that when it is time when the time comes when all the stars align that we're able to position to actually capitalize on that or or help people out in that situation but that's I mean I couldn't agree more
Nick Halaris
yeah and and that's a super good point it's it's related to another one of the character traits which is that in addition to unusual productivity and Relentless followup you have to be willing to engage in activities for a long time that have no apparent payback and psychologically that's really difficult it's actually really difficult for people who do well in school because school has this immediate payback function it's like oh you study hard you get a a on the test and in our world in real estate there's so much that you have to do where there is no clear payback and there may never be but you can't lose heart you have to keep going because you just never know and so you know that's psychologically it's hard for people to do that um but if you
Nick Halaris
can uh you could put yourself in a position to be successful it's like the
Taylor Avakian
unknown marshmallow test yeah you familiar with the marshmallow the one they do to the kids yeah yeah so just for people who don't know the marshmallow test so they brought these kids into a room I think this was a study they did and they put marshmallow out in front of them and they said hey you here's one marshmallow if you wait 5 minutes I'll give you two marshmallows but if you eat it you only get one right and they tested these out and I think they took these kids from the ones who took the marshmallow and those the ones who waited and looked at their career and the ones who were able to wait and have that patience did much better in their careers you know whatever they ended up going and doing because that patience that resilience that like I believe that
Taylor Avakian
there's something I I can wait it out and I can hold through because something's going to be better on the other side what's very interesting about real estate and you mentioned it too is like it's the unknown marshmallow test it's like maybe there's two but I don't know maybe there's 20 I don't know and there's no guarantee there's no guarantee it's like hey here's one marshmallow you can eat it now if you wait you might have 50 marshmallows or you might just only have the one right and and that's up to you to figure it out and that's a super super tough uh reality to be a part of and knowing that though from the experience and anecdotally I'm sure you've seen that play out time and time again yeah absolutely yeah it might
Nick Halaris
even be worse than that where it's like you're going you're going to go negative 500 marshmallows you're G to owe us 500 marshmallows then then maybe you'll get like 10,000 marshmallow that's this because in real estate you you do have to be willing to take what feels like an a lot of risk you know even a lot of entry-level jobs in in our industry they're low salary or no salary in some cases and you kind of just get what you get you know if you're successful and that's not true in a lot of Industries you know like you get a job at a Goldman Sachs or um consulting firm like you you get treated well from day one but in real estate a lot of times you're just out there uh but I I do think real estate is is a is a cool Industry and Training on entrepreneurs for
Nick Halaris
this reason because it's such a wild west place where you you learn the habits of Entrepreneurship in real estate really fast because there's no other way you have to or or you
Taylor Avakian
fail yeah right do you feel like um because what I always mention this and it feels to be true and my experience is that real estate is an information game it's an information ayure game if you know something that someone else doesn't know you can capitalize on that or make an opportunity out of something something um do you feel like we're headed in a Direction with the more information that's publicly available things are being more open kimono kind of situations people can see sales comps people can see what's happening from a micro macro legislative like do you feel like we're getting to a place that the actual fundamentals of of real estate are going to change the shifting of that and it's going to be less about that information asymmetry and more about I don't even know what what happens
50:00–1:00:00
Taylor Avakian
if you don't have that information asymmetry yeah it's an interesting question I
Nick Halaris
I think you're you're right that it's only a matter of time before the information games that it that it produced a lot of returns not all the returns it produce a lot of returns in real estate more so in other areas than ours because we we live in work in an era where like information is pretty accessible pretty available and it's not like the old days were like random deals would sell at wildly different prices because they're such an advantage yeah um so that probably happens and the other thing that probably happens too In Our Lifetime is that the sort of transactional Advantage goes away and what I mean by that is that this stuff's going to be freely tradable it's going to be tradeable in shares of smaller increments than
Nick Halaris
buying just the whole property like all that technology are basically already exists and the question now is you know putting it in putting it on top of real estate and making it work so blockchain and fractural shares and stuff that's where we're headed yeah exactly like that that to me seems like an The Logical next step for those Technologies is to actually go because because real estate's Antiquated in that sense like there's no liquidity in in this stuff there's no liquidity in the private partnership deals that get put together and really should be CU what why not right there's the puty and everything else on the planet basically uh so that happens but I think it there there's there's one area of real estate where you'll continue to be able to make returns which is or more than one like there's creativity which is understanding the Dynamics of of
Nick Halaris
Urban Evolution and putting yourself in a position to take advantage of it so if you see neighborhoods reading the sea leaves yeah you see neighborhoods turning or if you're really you know strategic you could you could turn a neighborhood Yourself by partnering with the right people and buying up enough properties those kinds of interesting strategies will continue to work and then you can you can never underestimate in real estate this is like the oldest the oldest wealth building strategy on Earth is to just effectively beat people on on your investment Horizon and what that means in real EST is in most cases if you buy in an urban area where people don't flee which that can happen like Detroit's a good example where I grew up you just have to buy this stuff and hold it and if you have
Nick Halaris
a time preference of forever you will end up producing better returns than even the people who are kind of looking for that 17 irr they do it for a few cycles and then they get a big negative where the person who bought the one building and said you know what I'm just going to hold this thing and I'm not going to pay any taxes on it for 40 years and then the person who does that in many cases in history has produced a better return yeah and real estate offers that
Taylor Avakian
because of the stability of the cash flows and in California even more and Ari was talking about this is the Prop 13 which is the lower property tax basis so your property taxes don't increase so it's more creative to be the owner it's more valuable for for you to own a property longer because your property taxes are lower than a new buyer because they reset so it's a very interesting Dynamic with with that in place um I think it's going to be nuanced with I'm curious to know if real estate becomes more of a big player like the big fish swallow up a lot of the Mom and Pops um it consolidates or if governments get involved uh from a housing perspective that's very interesting to me because of this affordability Gap that keeps climbing Higher and Higher and I've had a few people on here who've talked
Taylor Avakian
about voucher programs and Section 8 and having ways with the way AI is headed like who knows whe whether Ubi is going to be more instrumental if people lose a bunch of jobs and what are we going to do right how are you going to pay for things um is the government going to have to subsidize it so that's you know we're going to see it's going to play out whatever happens and is going to happen but it feels like people have a sentiment towards that if that's what's going to be actually occurring
Nick Halaris
moving forward yeah yeah it's it's look we're going into a really interesting time because technology is accelerating at a a crazy rate and it's absolutely going to be disruptive I mean I a lot of these white collar jobs like basically all the cool jobs that existed when I came out of college and when I came out of law school are and are a threat and these are high pay jobs and so what is what is that going to do what do you use
Taylor Avakian
any technology and are you exploring any technology to try to streamline the businesses that you guys are doing either the lending or uh
Nick Halaris
the the real estate staff the development not not really just cuz like we don't have a a scale problem because we're just small investing for ourselves uh but I could see how
Taylor Avakian
they would be super useful for that yeah I'm interested to see what these tools are just from being someone who's fascinated by yeah the efficiencies where you can build a one person business and have it incredibly valuable creates so much value where previously you had to have a bunch of scale from people now a days um I'm sure there'll be real estate owners and operators with AI property management and things like that that are were going to own thousands of units and have one person two people three people to to manage and and run and own all
Nick Halaris
of these buildings yeah like that's on the horizon yeah that's and and respond to the annoying customer complaints and all that stuff that is GNA that's already happening yeah and it's it's interesting yeah I I feel like the the macro question though that we were that you were just referencing about like what happens to real estate it we're at we're at a very important point I think in the evolution in the West in particular in America and Europe where it could go either way it could go to where real estate becomes like a public good like a utility and all the returns get sucked sucked up and that really just depends on how things go politically and what I've been trying to do with my writing and my podcasting is to sort of wake people up especially people like me who've made it and
Nick Halaris
kind of like made it sort of on a Libertarian ethos like there's is a big libertarian ethos in this country and but the truth is is that the government has the most power in our system whatever whatever business people want to think about themselves and their position in this Society if the government moves against them the government's going to win and so what I want to encourage people to do is to think about what kind of future they really want to be in and to work for that future instead of just looking at the government as some kind of enemy in our business it's really easy to just get really annoyed because the government we interface with the government and it's it's consistently frustrating it doesn't make any sense it feels corrupt it is corrupt right
Nick Halaris
you get developers going to jail all the time for paying off Jose are or whatever and so it's easy to just develop like man I I just want to close my eyes but we can't we can't close our eyes because one day it could all be taken away all this free capitalism could go the other direction and maybe for good reason right like if you if we can't produce with a combination of of free market and government policies housing for people then maybe it should get taken away right like so I'm trying to with with the rest of my career here is just keep focusing on that because I I don't want I don't want government to take over I believe in capitalism I believe I don't believe in you know complete libertarian ideas but I really believe that by and large people should be left alone
Nick Halaris
to pursue their creative Endeavors and if we don't get our act together that's going to be a threat and what we know from the 20th century is that that's a disaster if that happens then freedom is gone and nothing good happens for the population so we don't want yeah we don't want
Taylor Avakian
that we don't want that um I'm curious to know selfishly your newsletter um and speaking of creativity and wanting to educate people how um how did that start how did you grow it and where do you envision that going like where do you see that ultimately being yeah how
Nick Halaris
it started was for my entire adult life I WR I wrote Every almost every single day I have like a huge number of finished notebooks journals essentially and so I don't know I became an expert at writing whatever I'm not like a did of 10,000 hours yeah I'm not like u a David Foster Wallace genius writer but I can write I can hang yeah and uh during the covid era right at the beginning of the outbreak of covid I I was my kids were in preschool and I was involved in a bunch of City stuff at the time I was the chair of the Triple H commission and um on the LA City College Foundation board and that moment in time really kind of was a wake up for me because what I saw was this sort of immediate abandonment of community in favor of you know let
Nick Halaris
me protect my personal my perceived personal interests and I get it look a pandemic is scary but I saw enough incidents of that where like really concerned me about like what is going on with the the culture of America it felt like there was this like rotting
1:00:00–1:10:00
Nick Halaris
selfish self-oriented just let me get mine and and you see that all over the place like I think I'm right in the diagnosis that there's like a narcissism problem or something sure but my my thought was like well how could I make a difference than that like I'm a nobody so but I just started writing instead of writing for myself I started writing and putting it out there and I sent it to eight friends and then I added some more friends and then it started circulating and then it grew to maybe two or 3 thousand and then we started I started appearing on other podcasts and then it grew some more and then we have experimented in um in 2024 with a little bit of like promoting in other newsletters and uh got a bunch of subscribers from that wow some of which have stayed yeah you know it's when
Nick Halaris
you when you start advertising you get a lot of weird stuff like there's all kinds of fake emails basically so when you when you hear you hear someone say I have a million addresses well a lot of those are like robots yeah which I don't really understand the incentive structure for that yet I don't know what's going on but uh yeah because you're not trying to like get fake readers you want people to actually learn that stuff and I don't know why they sign up the thing that that I haven't quite figured out is why would somebody go through the process of going on to the website and like putting their email address in only to be a fake person to be not real yeah like it's not like I'm selling anything there's no fraudulent transaction that can be
Nick Halaris
done but maybe that's maybe other maybe that's true in other areas where you
Taylor Avakian
can got it execute some kind of yeah that's so interesting and so where do you see the newsletter going or where do you hope that to either lead to or to become its own entity or do you hope that to become more of this Academy or this growth or
Nick Halaris
business opportunities yeah I don't know actually i' I'd love to see it turn into a like a thriving arm of of my business work yeah uh I'm willing to just keep doing it like to to our Point uh about the marshmallow Jaz like I'm willing to keep just cuz I I like it and I I feel like it it's adding whatever value I can add to the world U but I'd love for it to grow and get to millions of readers I feel like the the message that I'm trying to communicate is something that would appeal to a lot of Americans and and people around the world actually and uh because it's about you know encouraging people to you find their calling and engage in their community and build wealth and do so in a way where they don't compromise their integrity so like that message to
Taylor Avakian
me feels like wor spreading is wor it's a very positive newsletter like you feel pretty fired up I at least I do when I when I read it and so I appreciate that about you how do you um again another selfish question how do you come up with um what you're going to write like does this just do you have themes do you have pillars do you know or is it inspiration at the moment do you batch these beforehand and the reason I'm curious is because I know a lot of people um don't want to work a job and you can make money being creative and doing your thing so yeah what's getting deep into the weeds like how do you
Nick Halaris
actually structure and and write it yeah uh the way things have evolved to now is I have a spreadsheet and on on one tab of the spreadsheet there's like a bunch of prompt questions that I've basically either brainstorm myself or or got heard from other writers that I found on the internet so I have I have the prompt questions and then I have a series of other tabs that are kind of broken up into pillars like politics or Civic action and financial stuff macroeconomic stuff spiritual stuff kind of all this stuff yeah and anytime an idea comes to me I just put something I just write it in the spreadsheet and then if I'm most of the time the act of writing it in the Spreadsheet will produce an idea for an article at some point like I don't even have to refer back to the
Nick Halaris
spreadsheet but occasionally I'll open up the spreadsheet and say okay I need something to write for next week let me let see what I can find yeah uh how long does it take you to write it's gotten down too bad like it's the average article is is like probably 1,200 words it takes me like two hours wow pretty efficient yeah I've gotten it down like I go on which makes me think I should write more then I'm like I have other things I have my business there's other responsibilities too right yeah yeah I go uh I go to Earth Cafe on Melrose which is my favorite coffee shop and the best writing spot on Monday usually Monday and I write the first draft and then like Tuesday I'll try to finish it wow and that way I can the rest of
Taylor Avakian
the week I can yeah try to focus on other stuff that's that's very interesting um and I think learning from people and mentors that I've had in my life too it's that um there's that Focus like I always come back to focus because that's my biggest issue that I have is there's so many things that I want to do I have so many ideas that I want to share and um work on and be a part of and there's a bunch of opportunities that are always present in in what I'm doing and it's okay this may be a good opportunity but it's not the opportunity that I've chosen or that I feel is the best direction to to go into and knowing that and being having the the the strength and the uh wherewithal to to stick with that yeah initial Focus point is it
Taylor Avakian
can be very difficult but um I agree
Nick Halaris
it's something that but it's a really important part of the process of being successful is the the learning how to what to say no to and I I you know I'm 45 and I still sometimes have second you know second guess myself but every time that I've said no to things that weren't like a 100% didn't feel like oh yeah this is like I feel compelled to do this good thing things happen cuz it opens up that space and it's harder it's harder to do that when you're younger you know like when I was 25 and trying to make it you know negative $200,000 in the bank or something like okay I might say yes to a lot of things because I don't I don't know what's going to happen totally but now that I I sort of know myself more I feel like as a as a man
Nick Halaris
in particular you don't really know yourself until you're kind of well into your 30s maybe 40s in some cases um but you have to say no and and that's popular wisdom that you'll find online now you'll see people saying like hey the best thing I think actually Tim Ferris just just published a book about this exact subject and it's it's a great topic because it's true like you can't especially when you start getting opportunities yeah like once you reach a certain level of success then people are going to start drawing upon you and it might not be good for you and you have to be willing to say no yeah not
Taylor Avakian
going to do that 100% um to wrap up I I kind of want to talk about the loan business you're starting and why and just give me a little color behind that
Nick Halaris
yeah absolutely um one thing before I forget just because you asked about the weeds yeah so for your newsletter which I love by the way I think I like the the themes that youve been using and I like the the idea of that you're trying to sort of add value in a very tactical way to people like me and other guests on the show so keep doing that than you and here's an idea for you to just consider so what I have been messing around with which is working is really giving myself a time limit I say I have 60 Minutes to write this thing and that time pressure produces results because writing can present in in psychologically as like the worst possible kind of marshmallow test yeah because like you're staring at a blank page what do I do I write
Nick Halaris
how many times do I edit it how long should I look at this page right it's like really psychologic Al challenging but if you just make some fake time limit
Taylor Avakian
like hey gu like a workout the constraints you constraint yourself yeah make that make that artificial constraint and force yourself to like you can only do this and this is how much time so you better [bleep] do it yeah yeah I like that 100% I'm I'm definitely going to be doing that try yeah try it and let me let me know how I got I will I will
Nick Halaris
100% yeah and then um the loans yeah so we started a company late last year called westw capital and the idea behind it is it's it's myself and John Young and Nick fenmore and then also a good friend of mine Max fredman who's a very successful commercial real estate broker he has his other company's called mandry capital and the idea was is that we would take our expertise in engaging in you know street level residential and multif family investing in in the most competitive market on the planet and uh create the kind of product uh lending product that we wish existed in 2010 when when I started than this buiz which is like people not to say that lenders don't know what they're doing but I sort of know what I'm we I'm sorry we know what we're doing in a different way
Nick Halaris
we know what it feels like to be a developer and house flipper spec homeb Builder we know all the pain points because we've done so many of these transactions and so we're just trying to essentially create a product that for a upand cominging entrepreneur or even someone's more seasoned who's looking for a lender who gets it and wants you know someone they can talk to that understands their pain points that's what we've created and on the return side like we're just offering market so there's no like Secret Sauce like we're not offering lower interest need we don't have access to some secret pool of capital that's priced at uh Prime minus 500 or something but we're going to offer Market based rates and just try to help these entrepreneurs and these investors succeed that's their goal
Taylor Avakian
so it's like um like YC right they're not just providing the capital they're providing the help and the growth and the structure
1:10:00–1:20:00
Taylor Avakian
yeah to then help someone be successful in whatever Endeavor you you're on their team it's not hey you know good luck here's some money and I think the I'm safe because I've calculated the risk profile of this and I'll still make my money back it's hey here's the money and like let's make this work for you let's let's make this succeed yep that's really cool that's really cool I'm excited to see where that goes with the guys and happy to be a referral source and resource to to you guys there well appreciate that Nick this is awesome man I know we could probably talk for hours about spiritual [bleep] that you know my real estate audience might not even want they might not but fair I appreciate you coming on man and looking forward to the next one yeah man thanks for having me on
Nick Halaris
I really enjoyed this conversation and appreciate the invite and I wish you all the best with your with your podcast and your work thank you brother appreciate it
Taylor Avakian
thanks thank you for listening to this episode if you enjoyed the podcast it would mean the world to me if you could rate US five stars on YouTube Spotify and apple podcast it really helps us get our name out there and helps us get fantastic people like our guests to share their insights and knowledge with you again my name is Taylor ven I specialize in the sale of apartment buildings in Los Angeles in Southern California and I look forward to sharing more of these conversations with you see you in the next
Nick Halaris
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