From 126 Single Family Rentals to 100 Million in Capital Raised

Steven Weinstock: 0:01 Hi everyone, and welcome to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. I've been investing in real estate for over 20 years, from single family homes to multifamily properties, and recently launching my real estate investment fund. This podcast is brought to you by WE Capital and the Goethals Capital Fund, where we buy properties in cash. We lock in deep discounts. We eliminate mortgage risk upfront. Refinance later on in order to scale. This show is not about me, it's about operators, founders, and closers who are building real results in real time. Today I'm speaking with Kevin Bupp. He's the founder of Sunrise Capital Investors and he hosts the Long Running Podcast, Real Estate Investing for Cashflow. He's also the author of The Cashflow Investor. He has a long track record in real estate. We'll get into what he's built, what he's learned, and how he sees the current market. Kevin, thank you very much for coming on. Kevin Bupp: 1:11 I've been a full-time real estate investor my entire adult life. I always joke and say that real estate found me at the age of 19. I didn't find it. Ultimately it was at an age where I was trying to figure out what to do in life. I just happened to meet a gentleman who became my mentor. I bought my first property at the age of 20, which was a single family property like a lot of folks start with. And through my early twenties, I scaled a fairly significant single family home portfolio. About 126 single family rentals by the age of 26. I started dabbling in multi-family properties around that time. Over the years, I've owned just about every type—assisted living, industrial, self storage, office, retail—and ultimately landed on what really has been our core focus for over a decade now. Back in 2011, I landed on mobile home parks. Now in addition to mobile home parks, we've got two verticals that we focus on at Sunrise Capital Investors, one being mobile home parks, buying those now for 14 years. And then the other is parking investments. Think parking garages, surface parking lots in urban core locations. Steven Weinstock: 2:40 I also started with single family homes back in 2001. When I bought my first single family home, my goal was to really just buy one property, pay it off over 30 years, have an extra retirement account. After a couple of months of collecting rent, the numbers started to click in my head and I said to myself, why just one, why not two? Why not three? Kevin Bupp: 3:47 There wasn't really a pivot or a very pinpointed transition from single family to multifamily. What ultimately occurred is I met an investor during my single family journey that was buying multifamily, and he was looking for a capital partner. So my initial entry point into multifamily was more as a capital partner than anything else. When everything crashed in 08, I looked back and reflected on the single family stuff versus the multifamily. And there was just a lot more efficiencies in the multifamily investments. When it came time to basically rebuild from the ashes, 08 through 2011 was a chaotic period, kind of damage control. And I knew that the second time around I had no interest in single family again. Just trying to scale one by one, there was lots of inefficiencies with the property management side. By happenstance, I met an individual named Randy who owned mobile home parks. And it was one of those asset classes I'd never considered. After a two hour lunch, he had gotten me so excited about mobile home parks that's what really shifted my direction. Steven Weinstock: 9:10 Florida. You're definitely in a good state. Are you only buying Florida? Kevin Bupp: 9:14 No. We buy all over. I think we currently own assets in 15 different states. We typically try to stay away from any states that have regulatory risk associated with rent control. Either it's in place or there's been heavy discussions around that topic. So that ultimately lands us in mostly red states. But we own in Maryland, which is very much a blue state. And Illinois, we own there as well. We go toward the opportunities. Steven Weinstock: 11:05 I myself started over 20 years ago. I couldn't touch New York when I first started. I started buying about 45 minutes away in central Jersey. I did dabble in New York for a while. I disliked being a landlord in New York. I owned some multifamily, I did well with the sale and on appreciation. But being a landlord, managing the property was tough. If you have a tenant that is not paying, that could cost you two years worth of rent sometimes with the way the court system is. Kevin Bupp: 11:52 We went through an experience back in 2019 or 2020 in the Bronx. We had a 52 pad mobile home park. Right after they passed the rent control laws in New York, about 75% of the park went on a rent strike. It cost me, I'm just ballparking here, probably $400,000 or $500,000 in legal fees and lost income. It took about two and a half years to finally get the full portfolio paying again.