RG 097 – The Importance of Having a Mentor to Get you into the Game with Devin Elder
About Devin
- Devin lives and invests in central Texas
- Devin is a serial entrepreneur
- He invests in single and multifamily properties
Nuts and Bolts
Devin is a multifamily syndicator who works excluseively in central Texas. He has raised his money from private investors andtransitioned from single to multifamily syndication. Devin was born in Texas and it’s where he raises his 3 kids. He’s been an entrepreneur for many years after he realized that he couldn’t work for a business that was owned by someone else. He knew that he could be an entrepreneur in many different sectors but he chose real estate. He started his real estate business while he was still in full time work and slowly made sure that he could support his family on the real estate income before he quit, this took 2 and a half years.
When Devin started in real estate he was buying single family rentals and holding them for cashflow, after a while he decided to start flipping them. He did this because flipping yields a larger pay-cheque and you only need to flip a couple of properties a year to cover his corporate salary. For Devin there are three pillars to working in real estate; money, team and deals, and started working on building these pillars while he was still in a corporate job. He started out working with hard money but quickly met investors who wanted to make their money work. He also created a strong team of contractors and management staff around him. He admits that he was lucky with time and geography because the market he was in was doing really well which helped him on a good road to making more money to reinvest. Devin invests by following the investment pyramid with cashflow along the bottom and riskier investments further up; you can’t do the higher investments until you’ve built a solid base.
At first Devin wasn’t doing any multifamily deals but he saw other people doing it and getting good returns. He didn’t want to grow his flipping or rental business’ any further because they both required a lot of work. So according to economies of scale the next step was multifamily deals. He bought his first multifamily property by himself to check he could do it before he brought in investors. When he flipped the property he sold it for 2.4 times the original purchase price. Now that he knew he could do multifamily he went out to find investors to do bigger deals. For Devin this experience proved his first rule of investing, you just need to get up and do it rather then spending too long reading and inside spreadsheets.
Top tips
- Most important habit – Looking at and updating his one-property-per-page spreadsheet
- Most influential person – His big brother
- Most important tool – No paper allowed in the office, so Google Docs
- Most important failure – Trusted someone that he shouldn’t have done, now he’s much more vigilent
- Contact – djetexas.comdevin.elder@djetexas.com