In today’s episode, we welcome Mike Morawski back to the show to talk about how to protect your real estate investments by underwriting conservatively, why you shouldn’t leave capital sitting on the sidelines and so much more!
Michael “Mike” Morawski is a 30-plus-year real estate investment veteran. He has controlled over $285,000,000 in real estate transactions. An entrepreneur, author, real estate trainer, public speaker, and personal coach. With a strong personal resilience and a deep desire to help others live extraordinary lives. He has coached hundreds of real estate investors to fulfill their dreams.
Today Michael’s passion is giving his knowledge and wisdom away to others for their gain. Mike is the host of the Insider Secrets Podcast and the co-host of Multifamily Unplugged Vidcast. Michael has built My Core Intentions as a training and coaching platform for real estate investors and industry professionals. His Core principle is to teach his clients how to create “short term cash flow and long-term wealth.” This is delivered through live and virtual training events, and three levels of personal coaching.
[00:01] – [05:48] From Having a Hundred Million Dollar Company to Losing Everything
- Mike shares how he got started in real estate, his early success, and losing everything in the 2008 housing crisis
- Listen to Mike’s previous episode here:
- Mike’s lessons in success – Have the right mindset to learn from failure
- Correlations between 2008’s housing market and today’s market
[05:49] – [13:33] Strategies to Keep Your Assets Protected
- Protecting your real estate investments by underwriting conservatively
- Why it’s better to underpromise and over-deliver
- Why a 20% annualized rent raise is unsustainable
- Sitting on capital on the sidelines doesn’t work and here’s why
[13:34] – [17:24] Closing Segment
- Upcoming projects and opportunities that Mike is excited about
- Reach out to Mike!
- Need a great start in creating your pathway to success? Download Mike’s FREE ebooks at https://mycoreintentions.com/free
- Final Words
Tweetable Quotes
“There are lessons to be learned in this success, the loss, and the redemption. Right. So listen, none of us should allow our future to be dictated by our past.” – Mike Morawski
“I’m not a real advocate of sitting on capital on the sidelines. It doesn’t work for you on the sidelines. I think that there are ways to deploy it, to make it work for you.” – Mike Morawski
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Connect with Mike Morawski
Website: https://mikemorawski.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/mike.morawski.54
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MikeMorawski
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mike.morawski.54
Connect with me:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
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Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com
Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:00] Mike Morawski: Well, if you’re an investor and you’re looking for an investment be in rent growth product. Because I conservatively underwrote this deal in Florida. And I said, okay, my one bedrooms, I’m going to be able to raise the rent 150 bucks a door. My two bedrooms, 250 bucks a door. That’s pretty conservative.
[00:00:18] Considering my property manager is just whipping units. Now at double.
[00:00:23] Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we’ll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.
[00:00:35] Sam Wilson: Mike Moraski is an entrepreneur author, real estate trainer, a public speaker and personal coach with strong personal resilience and a deep desire to help others live extraordinary lives. Mike welcome to the show.
[00:00:47] Mike Morawski: Hey Sam, thanks for having me back
[00:00:49] Sam Wilson: Hey man, it’s a pleasure. It’s absolutely a pleasure. You came on this show. This was episode 197, which I can’t believe it’s been that long, but that was published June 14th, 2021. So by the time this airs, it’ll probably be
[00:01:03] Mike Morawski: almost a year.
[00:01:05] This one going to be?
[00:01:06] Sam Wilson: I have no idea. It’ll be somewhere 520-550. We just put them all in the, I don’t know, they go in the queue, man. I’m not the one that handles that on my team, but yeah, it’ll be somewhere in that neighborhood, but it’s awesome to catch back up. I ask every guest who comes in the show.
[00:01:22] So just in case our listeners didn’t get a chance to listen to that episode. First in 90 seconds or less, tell me where you started, where you are now and how
[00:01:29] Mike Morawski: you got there. Absolutely. I started in real estate sales, selling hundreds of houses. I went into the apartment business, built a hundred million dollar company through a syndication and a property management company.
[00:01:44] I lost everything as a result of the 2008 debacle wound up on a 10 year federal prison sentence, serving eight of those 10 years behind a wall. And today I’m home in the coaching and training business. Teaching people, how not to make those same mistakes, how to live a balanced quality lifestyle and increase their business profitability and bottom line.
[00:02:07] Sam Wilson: And for those of you, again, if you haven’t gone back or you haven’t heard Mike story, it’s a good one. So go back and listen to his story. I don’t think he holds anything back, which we certainly appreciate. I know it’s a humbling story for you to tell, but it’s also a story of redemption and yeah, I think it’s a great story.
[00:02:24] So appreciate you always being so vulnerable and sharing that. So
[00:02:26] Mike Morawski: what I want to say though about that, Sam is I do share that story openly and vulnerably. I believe that there’s hope and inspiration in my journey. And I also believe that there’s lessons to be learned in this success, the loss and the redemption.
[00:02:41] Right. So listen, none of us should allow our future to be dictated by our past. Don’t look in the rear view mirror, look out the windshield and
[00:02:49] Sam Wilson: move forward. Yeah. And nobody can drive a car, looking out the rear view mirror. That’s a bad way to get down the road. When you say lessons in success that you share with your coaching clients, what does that term even mean?
[00:03:01] Mike Morawski: Lessons in success. You know, I think that there’s success in the failure. Right? Cause it’s not that I failed. It’s not that I lost everything. I just learned a different way of not doing something. Right. If you take a look at Thomas Edison, when he created the light bulb, you know, the comment is, Hey, I just learned 10,001 ways that it wasn’t going to work.
[00:03:21] Right. So I kind of look at it the same way. I built a heck of a big business. I built it really fast over leveraged under capitalized and very unstable. And if you can, as an entrepreneur, get your arms around those three things and then pay attention to the details and listen to people around you. I think as an entrepreneur, you can knock it out
[00:03:45] Sam Wilson: of the park for yourself.
[00:03:46] What do you see if any correlation between 2008 and where we are now in the market?
[00:03:55] Mike Morawski: You know, I see a lot of similarities. I see some edginess in the banking industry where they’re starting to float some loan programs out there. You know, I had something come across my desk the other day that said, Hey, 85 to 90% LTV on your $5 million multifamily deal.
[00:04:16] And I thought to myself, man, you guys should be put out of. I honestly thought that. That was the first thought that went through my mind. And because that was one of the things that got me in trouble, I had $60 million worth of real estate that I was over leveraged on. I don’t think anybody should be buying a piece of real estate in today’s environment unless they’re 65 to 70% loan to value.
[00:04:40] If you are chasing rents right now and raising rent rates at unprecedented underwrite. Stop it go back and take a look at, you know, be conservative. This market’s going to change. There’s going to be a shift. You know, I see a lot of people growing really fast, buying big assets for lots of money and buying multiple assets for lots of money.
[00:05:04] One of the things that caught me was I grew too fast. This is a marathon. It’s not a. And I think that if you’re not looking at those things, you know, there’s going to be a change in the housing market. We’re going to see foreclosures appear. Like we haven’t seen them in the last seven or eight years, but they’re coming back.
[00:05:24] I have some friends that are. In that space in the residential foreclosure space attorneys that deal with the banks. And there is a backlog right now. So when they open these flood gates, there’s going to be some challenges. Will it affect the commercial real estate space? Like it did last. You know, Sam, I don’t know, but last time I didn’t think it was going to affect the commercial real estate space either.
[00:05:48] Sam Wilson: Yeah, I’m with you. There’s a lot of obviously uncertainty. A question I always like to ask guests on the show is what’s something you’re curious about and more often than not. And I probably don’t ask it as much anymore because the answer is always like, I’m just curious and is, you know, what’s going to happen with all of this.
[00:06:04] I mean, we’ve printed just an unbelievable amount of money. So obviously asset prices are rising. Inflation is going nuts. I mean, where does this end? And you can listen to two schools of thought. There’s one school of thought that says, Hey, we have a massive crash and we have massive deflation. And there’s the other school of thought that says no, just to be runaway inflation.
[00:06:20] Like neither one of them is good. Nobody’s saying, oh, there’s a bright rosy future ahead. So, you know, that’s not the story I’m hearing from either camp, but I’m really curious for you. What are you guys doing? Cause you mentioned here, you know, growing really fast, was it maybe a mistake you guys had made you were over levered, the high LTVs bad loans, you know, loans that were written with terms that no one could comply with, unless everything just went along perfectly.
[00:06:44] What are you guys doing right now to make sure that your protected
[00:06:48] Mike Morawski: underwriting conservatively. Let me give you an example. We just bought a deal in Tampa, Florida, 40 units. We actually closed down it, you know, a couple of months ago. One of the things in our underwriting process was I did not want to come out with these extravagant numbers.
[00:07:03] Like we were going to hit 20% on investor’s IRR with a 12 or 15% cash on cash return. Right. I think those numbers are. The sponsors that are putting that stuff out today, need to pull back on the reins. I just did a passive webinar where we brought some investors in, you know, we had about 80 people online and I said, look, I said, one thing that I’m very conscious of today is how do we look at these numbers?
[00:07:30] Spreads. I think as an investor, you should be looking at six to 8% cash on cash return. And you should be looking at a 13% higher if you’re seeing stuff that’s higher than that, I’d really be concerned because I think the market’s going to change so much that it’s going to cause instability. Sam, you said it hit the feds, just raised interest rates.
[00:07:49] Again yesterday you got gas. That’s at seven bucks a gallon on the west coast. It’s at five bucks a gallon in the middle. You got bread and milk and eggs that are more money and you can’t get lumber fast enough. Right? Where’s the market going to go, but here’s what I’ll tell you. On the other side, how do you hedge against that?
[00:08:06] Well, if you’re an investor and you’re looking for an investment, be in rent growth products. Because I conservatively underwrote this deal in Florida. And I said, okay, my one bedrooms, I’m going to be able to raise the rent 150 bucks a door. My two bedrooms, 250 bucks a door. That’s pretty conservative considering my property manager.
[00:08:26] Is just whipping units now at double there. So anybody who got involved in that deal is going to see a much better return on investment that changed the numbers to like a 20% higher or it’s just silly money.
[00:08:41] Sam Wilson: It’s silly money. And I guess the idea is that you underwrite it. In the potential worst case scenario, I guess that’s what I’m hearing.
[00:08:51] Cause know, Hey, if you promise investors a 6% cash on cash and that’s what you delivered. Okay. You know, no one can get upset, but if you promised them 15 and you gave him six, then everybody’s upset. I mean, is that the idea behind that? Or is there.
[00:09:05] Mike Morawski: Yeah. I’d like to under promise and over deliver for sure.
[00:09:08] And does that mean that I’ll get as many investors as fast as I possibly could if I was promising a 20% sure because people are still of the old school, but I have friends that have been in the business 25, 30 years. Doing the same thing and they’ve pulled back so far right now, you know, I got one buddy, they’re raising capital and they’re paying their investors of 5% preferred return.
[00:09:34] And that’s it. No equity in the deal. So as an investor, they’re going out to the hedge funds. They’re going out to the pension funds and they’re bringing capital in and they’re paying a 5%, no equity in the deal. And they’re doing 50% debt, 50% equity. So when you do the math like that, you say, wow, we could probably deliver a better product, a better return.
[00:09:56] And of course, those are, you know, A-class products, fresh bill cost a little bit more money, but you can buy this product. Now, when you have those types of terms in your equity investors, there’s just safety in that.
[00:10:09] Sam Wilson: There really is. That would be for a capital raiser. That would be amazing if I could find capital that just wanted a 5% preferred return, no equity.
[00:10:18] That sounds like, you know, monster institutional money that is just desperately seeking yield more than our everyday investors, maybe that you and I
[00:10:26] Mike Morawski: work with. Yeah, for sure. And then what you can do is you don’t have to. Play around with your exit cap rate, right? I mean, you can say, okay, so if this deal trades out at six in seven years from now, I’m okay.
[00:10:39] Right, right. Because if the market shifts enough because to try and keep cap rates compressed at two and 3% right now, You might find yourself in a tough spot, come five, six years from
[00:10:49] Sam Wilson: now. Well, that’s exactly right. I mean, there’s the argument, the cap rates, regardless of where interest rates go, there’s this argument that cap rates will still stay low.
[00:10:58] Even if the cost of capital is greater than what you’re going in. Cap rate is because they have the potential to value add they have the potential to raise rents. They can do all this stuff that will then inflate that cap rate, obviously to a number that makes sense upon stabilizing. If I even said that correctly, and if I didn’t, you can get on here and send me a snide remarks on YouTube.
[00:11:18] You know, even with that, there comes that other market dynamic that I think people are missing, which is can the people afford the higher rent. Can they afford the per square foot price in a building? That’s more, I mean, at some point, if the economy takes a complete bath, people just, aren’t going to have the liquidity to go out and just keep paying a 20% annualized ramp up.
[00:11:40] Does that sound fair?
[00:11:41] Mike Morawski: And that’s what happened to the US. Last time jobs got lost businesses got closed. People moved home, people moved out, they doubled. My occupancy dropped. My NOI ran wild off the chains and I couldn’t pay my bills. And we went back with some deals, mitigated with the banks, got lower interest rates, got principal knocked off, you know, and it still wasn’t enough and couldn’t do it on every deal.
[00:12:06] But we tried on a few animals. Testing the water. It didn’t even work. Then this goes back to, you know, if you’ve got a cap rate on a deal right now, that’s a terminal cap and you’ve projecting, you’re going to get out of this deal in six years at a three or a four. And that thing runs wild and you’re at a six and five years from.
[00:12:25] You’re screwed. Right. You know, so except for the guys that stood by and said, Hey, you know, I’m going to buy some of this stuff when it goes crazy again. Right.
[00:12:34] Sam Wilson: Right. Which is another option. It’s tough. I’ll tell you. It’s really tough to sit with. I call it dry powder, have dry powder on the sidelines, especially when we’re watching the value of that dry powder.
[00:12:46] Just dissipated at incredible. Great, you know, year over year, what publishing 7% now, which I think is the fraudulent number. Anyway, it’s probably north of 10 to 15. And if they’re being really honest on an inflation rate, so that’s tough to do, you know, to hold capital, you guys taking that approach on anything.
[00:13:02] Mike Morawski: Yeah. You know, I’m not a real advocate on sitting
[00:13:05] on capital on the sidelines. I think you should. It doesn’t work for you on the sidelines. I think that there’s ways to deploy it, to make it work for you. But, you know, I’m of the opinion that you have to, you know, keep your capital at work at a quarter of a percent or a half a percent even taking advantage of the overnight swap.
[00:13:25] You can’t make any money down. Yeah,
[00:13:27] Sam Wilson: what have I heard? What did somebody tell me once it scared money? Don’t make no money this right. I think that’s what you’re telling me here. Mike, tell me about something that you are currently excited about. We’ve talked kind of doom and gloom, worst case scenario.
[00:13:42] What’s something you go, man. I’m pumped about
[00:13:43] Mike Morawski: this summer in the city, Sam. I live in Chicago, summers coming, nothing like a bike ride on the lakefront. Nice hot summer day in the sun, watching the boat.
[00:13:55] Sam Wilson: That sounds great. Chicago is one of my favorite cities, especially there, along the lake shore. That’s a pretty place to be.
[00:14:00] Mike Morawski: She come out, hang out one weekend and we’ll find some fun things to do
[00:14:04] Sam Wilson: for sure. Absolutely. We can get into a lot of trouble there in Chicago. Tell me on a business front, what’s something that you’re looking forward to that you said, man, this is an initiative we’re undertaking. Or this is maybe somewhere we see, you know, good opportunity.
[00:14:18] Mike Morawski: Yeah. You know, I told you when we jumped on this morning that I’m getting my arms around this again, and you know, I’m raising capital to do deals and, you know, I had another investor make a commitment this morning and that excites me right now because I’ve been out of the game for a while. But now back in the game, Helping other people grow their multifamily business and then partnering with them as well.
[00:14:42] It’s just been a great venture for me to get back into. Like my one buddy says to me all the time he goes, man, I know you’re going to knock it out of the park. And you know, that’s not the objective or the goal, the objective. And the goal is really to help other people grow. And for them to knock it out of the park, Zig Ziglar always said that if you help enough other people get what they want, you’ll ultimately get what you.
[00:15:06] But for me, the exciting thing is to raise capital today. And you know, my goal this year is to raise a couple million dollars in capital and buy another 500 units for our group to push the envelope forward a little
[00:15:17] Sam Wilson: bit this year. I love it. Mike, thank you for taking the time to come on today. I don’t know if we got a chance last time to chat about your book.
[00:15:25] I think that’s behind you. Exit plan is your book. Isn’t it.
[00:15:28] Mike Morawski: I wrote exit plan because everybody, all the trainers and coaches, some great trainers and coaches in the marketplace that I’ve learned from, even everybody teaches you how to buy a deal, find a deal, get in a deal, operate it. Nobody teaches you how to get out.
[00:15:43] Nobody teaches you where to maximize your. Your guests could go download a free copy of that book. They can go to my website at mycoreintentions.com/free and grab a copy of Exit Plan. There’s a couple other things out there that they could explore Multifamily Fundamentals. And if you’re a passive investor, 27 Must Ask Questions of a sponsor, jump in.
[00:16:08] It’s a great game. It’s really growing and I don’t see any reason to not stay really connected and involved over the next several years.
[00:16:18] Sam Wilson: I love it. Mike, if our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
[00:16:22] Mike Morawski: Track me down on social media. For sure. I hang out on LinkedIn, Instagram, any place you get your fix.
[00:16:29] That’s where I’m at. And always trying to throw some great content up there. Even somebody even said to me the other day, man, I can’t believe you’re even on ticket. But direct message me. I love to network, so message me there, or send me an email@mycoreintentions.com.
[00:16:44] Sam Wilson: I love it. Yeah. You’re absolutely active on LinkedIn, which is where I spend most of my time.
[00:16:49] I’m always like, man, there’s Mike again. He’s always putting something out there so, well, I certainly appreciate it.
Outro: Thank you again for your time, Sam, you have a great day. Thanks. Thanks for listening to the how to scale commercial real estate podcast. If you can do me a favor. And subscribe and leave us a review on apple podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, whatever platform it is you use to listen.
[00:17:10] If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.
