From Pro Hockey to $300M in Real Estate: Zane Schartz on Building Freedom CRE

Steven M Weinstock: 0:01 - Hi. Welcome back to the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock, where Top Operators deal makers share what actually works in business and in life. Todays guest is Zane Schartz, and his story checks a few unexpected boxes. Hes the founder of Freedom CRE, a company focused on single tenant triple net retail assets with a portfolio thats grown to over $300 million across the country. But before real estate, Zane spent almost three years skating professionally as a hockey player. So yeah, were talking to someone who went from body checks to credit checks. This episode isnt just about investing, its about reinvention, discipline, structure, and finding a lane most people overlook. Were going to talk about how Zane went from the rink to retail, how he built a lean national platform, and why hes bullish on assets most people ignore. Lets get into it. Zane, thank you very much for joining us. | Zane Schartz: 1:04 - Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. I love those alliterations - body checks to credit checks. I love checks. | Steven M Weinstock: 1:14 - Yeah, I try my best. Lets talk about Freedom CRE. What was the very first deal you closed under that name and how did it come together? | Zane Schartz: 1:23 - The very first deal we closed under that name was a Family Dollar. And we actually bought it from the former private equity company that I used to work at. So I worked at another private equity firm for six years and ran these funds very similarly. And I left over two years ago now. The first property we bought was from that company and I was actually the one who acquired it for that old private equity group. So I knew it was a good property and I was already in negotiations for a lease extension and ended up buying it for my new Freedom Commercial Real Estate. That was our first one. And then since then weve added new tenants and diversified into different industries. So now we do tenants like Starbucks, auto parts stores, telecom stores where we own the property. And then these multi-billion dollar companies like Verizon, Starbucks, Dollar General, AutoZone are paying our rents. | Steven M Weinstock: 2:19 - Got it. I saw on LinkedIn you once posted about walking away from a hundred thousand dollars earnest money deposit to protect your investors. Thats not something you see every day. It was your money on the line that you walked away from. What happened over there? | Zane Schartz: 2:33 - Oh, my pockets were definitely a lot lighter after that one. So we got that one under contract and it was a really good property. This was actually, we were gonna buy an A-plus class multifamily deal, 2024 build property. This was actually last year. And I always make sure that my investors are first. And I do that because I have a lot of friends and family who invest with me and myself personally. And yeah, we had a hundred K of earnest money and it went hard. And after it went hard, we kinda learned stuff about the property that wasnt really disclosed and that we did not learn in our 45 day due diligence. So that could be our fault, that could be the sellers, but we found stuff that we were just like, Hey, this isnt gonna do it for us. This is probably gonna be more money than we had budget to fix. And because of that, I wasnt gonna fit a square peg in a round hole. And the seller wasnt super willing to work with us and they were pressuring us to do other things. So I was just like, Hey, Id rather lose the hundred K out of my own money than continue to raise investors money and just get across the finish line. Because in the end that hundred thousand dollars might hurt today, but in the future itd hurt more if I lost investors capital. And for me, capital preservation for our investors is much more important than putting money in my own pocket. Like Im not doing this to pad my pockets. Im doing it to help other people get wealthy. And then a byproduct of that is obviously operators making money as well. | Steven M Weinstock: 3:52 - Yeah, thats very smart and your investors should definitely be happy to hear that. You have $300 million in assets under management. At what point did you realize, or did you feel that, wow, okay, Freedom CRE has momentum? | Zane Schartz: 4:25 - So Ive always had the long-term vision of being an entrepreneur and having my own company. So I knew even when I was at that old company that I would be doing this someday myself. And then honestly, my track record there, I worked there for six years. We had a lot of investors that followed me to my new company, so they knew that I was in control and running a lot of what was happening over there. And once I left, they said, okay, were gonna follow you. So that was a huge blessing and allowed me the opportunity to start a little bit further along than most. So I had some investor capital ready to play with. And then as weve had success and done well for them, obviously happy investors are repeat investors and happy investors are investors who send you referrals. Weve done well and honestly, over the past six or seven months since I started using LinkedIn, I have had exponential growth. I probably have 15 or 20 new investor calls a week. It is absolutely insane the amount of traction that we are getting from LinkedIn, and I think a lot of that is due to me being very transparent on LinkedIn. I dont hold any information close to my chest. I say why I like deals, what deals were looking at, why were looking at them. Ill even post deals and be like, Hey, were thinking about making an offer on this one. Im just not greedy with any of the information I have or any of the knowledge that Ive obtained. I just want to help people. Thats really why I do it. | Steven M Weinstock: 5:54 - Yeah, I follow your LinkedIn and its very well written. Why and how did you zero in on single tenant triple net leases types of property? | Zane Schartz: 6:36 - Yeah. So at that old private equity firm I worked at, I was the chief investment officer there. So I did mostly acquisitions and I was in charge of all the multifamily acquisitions. So I knew how to underwrite a deal and then saw them come to fruition or not. And a lot of things that I didnt like about multifamily were the variables that are out of your control in terms of expenses, cost of goods, cost of labor, insurance going up. Theres just a lot of variables that you cant control. When I left, I wanted to create something that was very low risk, very stable, very consistent. And for me the most stable, consistent way to do it was buy properties where the people paying your rent are multi-billion dollar companies backing your lease. And for us, were fully reimbursed on taxes and insurance and common area maintenance. So we dont have a ton of operational risk in terms of variances on our returns. | Steven M Weinstock: 8:40 - What do most people get wrong when they look at a triple net deal or tenant credit? | Zane Schartz: 8:46 - I think most people assume that just because its a name brand, that its an investment grade tenant. So everything we buy is investment grade, meaning it has a triple B or higher credit rating from Moodys or Standard and Poors. People will say, oh, we have a Subway or a Dunkin Donuts or a Pizza Hut, those are all great name brands and national name brands, but theyre not investment grade because all those are backed by franchisees. We only buy companies that are backed by the corporations that are publicly traded companies. | Steven M Weinstock: 10:25 - So youre saying you stay away from franchisees? | Zane Schartz: 10:49 - Correct. We dont buy any franchisees. Thats our niche - only leases backed by the multi-billion dollar tenants. Starbucks is 100% corporate owned. Every property they own is managed and ran by Starbucks corporate all over the world. | Steven M Weinstock: 13:10 - Youve mentioned on some of your posts that monthly distributions to your investors is a game changer. What makes your model more predictable for investors? | Zane Schartz: 13:21 - Easy answer. We have fixed rental income and we have fixed debt on every deal. So those are the two biggest variables in your bottom line - what is your income, what are your expenses and whats your debt service? Our expenses are pretty much fixed. Our income is definitely fixed for X amount of years, however long the lease is. And then debt service - we only do fixed rate interest. So because of the consistency and stability of what we do, we can send monthly distributions every single month like clockwork to our investors. | Steven M Weinstock: 15:32 - As far as your investors, are you targeting everybody? Do you have any mom and pop investors? | Zane Schartz: 15:50 - Yeah, so our minimum is a hundred K. We only work with accredited investors and our target investors are doctors, attorneys, engineers, pro athletes, executives - any high net worth individual who is an accredited investor and wants monthly cash flow is who we work with. And we have 400 plus investors right now. Im not trying to be the highest return in an investors portfolio. Im trying to be the most stable and consistent. | Steven M Weinstock: 19:38 - Zane, youre an athlete. You played on multiple teams across multiple leagues. Tell us some lessons you learned that stick with you now as a business owner? | Zane Schartz: 19:51 - Yeah, I had the opportunity to play at some pretty high levels. I played professionally, got paid to play a game, which was pretty fun. Never made it to NHL, but I got close, played with a lot of guys who did play in the NHL. I love hockey. Its a huge part of my life. I played at Liberty University and then played professionally after that in North America and Europe - Germany, Finland, and Hungary. And I always tell people business and hockey have so many overlaps. I think the biggest thing that I take from sports to the business world is the ability to learn how to lose and move forward. One of my favorite quotes is success is moving from failure to failure without lack of enthusiasm. Thats rolled over into real estate. You make offers on deals that you dont get. You might think a deal might do this, but it does that. Just rolling with the punches and moving forward and using them as learning tools. | Steven M Weinstock: 25:43 - If you werent doing real estate, what would you be doing? | Zane Schartz: 25:49 - Id probably be a missionary. My faiths the most important thing about me, and Id probably go across the world telling people about the hope that changed my life and the hope in Jesus that I found. And I try to be a missionary to the real estate world and I try to be a missionary to the hockey world. My life changed when I surrendered it to Jesus. When I got out of hockey, I actually considered going into ministry and working out of a church, but the Lord made it pretty clear that business is where I was supposed to be. | Steven M Weinstock: 26:24 - Faith is very important. It is to me as well. Whats next for Freedom CRE over the next few years? | Zane Schartz: 26:38 - Oh man. We want to be a known name in the space for triple net investment grade tenants. We want to build offerings for investors that cash flow day one. And then something that were excited about - we want to get into tokenization of real world assets. We are going to be looking to create tokens that represent ownership in these funds that can be transferred to anybody across the world at any point. I think the future is here for blockchain. Its not crypto, were not talking crypto. This is going to be a digital representation of ownership in hard assets, real world assets. I think the future is going to be people are gonna own everything on a digital wallet and in that will be their investments. | Steven M Weinstock: 27:41 - Okay, Zane, this was great. That is it for todays episode of The Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstock. Big thanks to Zane Schartz for breaking it down. He went from pro hockey to building a $300 million portfolio and why he sticks to single tenant retail and what it actually takes to stay disciplined while scaling. If you enjoyed this one, share it with someone who is thinking differently about real estate business or just trying to build something of their own. I am Steven Weinstock. Thanks for listening. I will catch you on the next one.