RG 119 – Top 5 Tips to Find the Best U.S. Real Estate Markets with John Casmon
About John
- John is based in Chicago
- John’s original business partner was his wife
- John is the co-founder of the Midwest Real Estate Networking Summit
Nuts and bolts
John is an apartment investor based in Chicago and has a controlling ownership of over $18million worth of real estate. John also has a podcast called Target Market Insights and is the co-creator of the Midwest Real Estate Networking Summit. John made his first dollar as a child sweeping the warehouse of the record company his mother worked for, he then got a taste for entrepreneurship and started to buy and re-sell blueberry pops to make a profit. John worked with only his wife until 2 years ago when he brought in external partners. He ran into a wall where he only had so much liquid capital to finance the purchases he wanted to make, in order to scale up he needed to grow his team.
John first got into real estate at college where he received an FHA loan of $100,000 and did his first deal of a duplex in Chicago in partnership with his families business. He did a lot of research into neighborhoods and chose somewhere with no previous downturns and as a result the property did really well. He refinanced and created $150,000 in equity.
When John partners with syndicators he isn’t only looking at Chicago anymore, he looks beyond population growth and economic growth and judges the market as a whole then divides into submarkets. He also looks at other developments and their net absorption and then makes sure he’s conservative with his underwriting. John tries to invest along the path of progress by identifying the presence of a university of hospital and he looks more closely to see if that university is growing. He also checks the tax increment funding in the neighborhood to see if the government is putting money into the market. John checks out the building commission to see what’s going tobe build and the city economic council to check for any financial incentives in the area or highlighted places for growth. Finally John also checks the businesses and shops in the area to see what class they are, for example a Trader Joe’s would be class A.
John set up his podcast called Target Market Insights by looking at what value he could add to the real estate podcast niche. He wanted to do something unique rather than adding a duplicate voice, so he made sure the podcast was about education. He set up the networking summit with Brie Schmitt after he realized that his business grew with each conference he went to, so he wanted to start something in Chicago around education.
Top Tips:
- Most important habit – Writing goals daily
- Most influential person – Grandmother Claudia
- Most important tool – Email and Boomerang
- Contact – Casmoncapital.com @jcasmon on twitter
