On this episode of The Mobile Home Park Lawyer, Ferd is joined by MHP owner/operator and podcaster Ryan Narus. Ferd and Ryan discuss networking, the importance of setting boundaries, guarding your time, the affordable housing crisis and Ryan’s mentoring program. Enjoy!
“I want to be on my death bed thinking back on my life, and I’m not going to be thinking about how much money I made or all these accolades I won. I’m going to be thinking back on my life saying I came into this and I left it a little bit cleaner and a little bit better because I was in it.”
HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00 – Intro
0:30 – Ryan gives us an insight into his background and tells us how he got into MHP
5:24 – Ryan shares his opinion on the MHP industry and what changes he’s seeing within the industry
12:55 – Ryan speaks about his first deal
16:03 – Ferd asks Ryan about his joint venture and asks how he networked to find people he wanted to do business with
20:13 – Ryan discusses his mentoring program. You can find out more about Ryan’s mentoring program through his website mobilehomeparkmentors.com
23:06 – Ryan shares his thoughts on the importance of setting boundaries when working on deals
23:41 – Ryan gives us some negotiating tips
28:28 – Ryan talks about the affordable housing crisis
35:14 – Ryan states how he wants to leave this life thinking thinking “I came into this, the world was like this, and I left it a little bit cleaner and a little be better because I was in it”
35:34 – You can find Ryan’s podcast by searching Mobile Home Parks In Real Life, you can find Ryan on YouTube at Archimedes Group or through LinkedIn at Ryan Narus
36:10 – Ryan shares a final piece of advice
FIND | RYAN NARUS:
Podcast: Mobile Home Parks In Real Life (MHP_IRL)
Youtube: Archimedes Group
Linkedin: Ryan Narus
Mentoring Program: mobilehomeparkmentors.com
FULL TRANSCRIPTION:
Ferd Niemann: Welcome back mobile home park nation. Ferd Niemann here again today. Another episode, another great guest for you. My guest, he’s a mobile home park owner/operator, he’s a podcaster, he’s real big on team investing, mentorship, great resource for industry. I’m sure you’ve heard of him, please help me welcome my guest Ryan Narus. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Narus: Hey, I’m excited to be here.
Ferd Niemann: Thanks, man. Well, I think a lot of people probably know about you and know of you. For those that don’t maybe give us a little more about your background. We can start from there and just how you got into MHP and then go from there man.
Ryan Narus: Yeah. I just bought the lie. Plain and simple, I was a millennial or I am a millennial. And when I was in my early twenties, and really my whole life, I just bought the lie that us millennials get fed, which is go to school, work really hard, go to a good college, work really hard, dare get good grades. Then you’ll funnel out and have a great job. And then you’ll work your way up the corporate ladder and then retire on a beach one day. And it turns out the amount of stress that you’re under as a high school student. It really, in my opinion, took away the fun that I probably could have had in the social skills and all sorts of stuff I could have been developing. So that was kind of a lie. Then I go to a good school. I went to Wake Forest University. It was a dream school. I went, so I loved it so much I went twice. I got my master’s in business there, and that rattled me with a lot of student loan debt. And then I went from job to job to job even before, so mostly before I went to MBA and I found myself feeling underpaid, overworked and like, everything was meaningless. Like this is totally, this is dumb. There’s no meaning or purpose behind what I do. So, and then as you can assume, then there was no beach retirement.
Ferd Niemann: There was a trailer park.
Ryan Narus: And so eventually I just, you know, I was sitting, I remember this, I was sitting with my hiring manager in one of my former jobs. And he was telling me, you know, you get promoted to the finance, you’re a finance manager, then a sales manager and then a general manager. And then you’re this, and here’s how it’s going to go. And you’re not going to have any day off, but Sunday, and you’re not going to see your kids grow up except for on the weekends and all for maybe a couple of hundred thousand bucks a year. And I was like, forget that man. I want my name on the side of the building. That’s the dude who rolls up in his Ferrari, celebrates when you do something great and then says, all right, get back to work. I was like, I want to be that guy. And so I just, I spent the better part of see here, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur in like 2011, 2012. And I found mobile home, it took me three years to find mobile home parks in 2015. And Ian Tutor, my business partner and I, we put our heads together. We said, we’re definitely starting a business. What is it going to be? Well, the first ideas was mobile home parks. I said, I love it, but here’s a problem. We’re trying to buy commercial real estate and we’re both in our twenties and have no money, no experience, and no network. How the heck do we do this? And we said, well, guess what? We also have no excuses. So call it an advantage, call it a curse, call whatever you want. Ian and I took about two years to go full time and going full-Time meant basically having no health insurance, no 401k, living in a double-wide for 14 months. And then I moved into our next acquisition after that for another few months. So for about 18 months on and off, living in a single or a double wide on a blow-up mattress. And then when I finally did get home in full-time in 2019, I was paying myself $35,000 a year. So it was really ugly. It was really messy. I had my life threatened. I’ve been sued. I’ve had to Sue, it’s been a rollercoaster of a ride and Ferd, it was so much fun. When I quit corporate America and went full-time, I lost 15 pounds. And let me tell you something, it wasn’t because I changed my diet. That was straight sad weight by chasing my dreams. So yeah, that’s us in a nutshell.
Ferd Niemann: That’s interesting, man. Well, I’m not sure if that’s an inspirational story or a warning to, you know, this is going to be a long slug, but I mean, that’s part of being an entrepreneur, right. There’s the good days and there’s long days and the hard days and the scary days. And as you build time, you know, and build experiences like, you know, every once in a while, you wake up and you’re like, I think it’s starting to come together. I think it’s working and then you start to feel it working. And then you get the next stress of looking out I am hiring somebody. Now I’m hiring somebody new. Okay, am I going too fast? Am I going too slow? Can I keep, you know, been there man, we’d been there, a lot of those similar stories. I never did live in a double-wide. I slept on an air mattress before, but never a never double-wide. So you got me on that one, for sure. I did single family first. So I was living college housing building bedrooms and addicts and building bedrooms and basements and packing six guys in a house. And that was my house hack launching point if you will. But anyway, MHP is where I’m at now, man. It’s a great place to be. Tell me what your views are on the industry right now. I know we follow this all the time and all of us do I think, but I mean, what are you seeing in the market, I know you’re based out of Southeast, I’m in the Midwest. But I think it’s pretty similar nationwide as far as what we’re seeing with the current market dynamics from supply chain, from pricing, banking, etc. Just interested in your thoughts on that as we dive into more topics here.
Ryan Narus: I think that’s a great question. And I think that in the six years going on six years, I’ve been in this space, I’ve seen a lot of major changes. And I think in the next five, we’re going to see more than we ever have. So it’s kind of like technology, right? Like as soon as the internet comes out within five years, everybody’s completely different. You go from, wow, you’ve got mail. What a cute movie to, everyone has an email address. And I think that as the mobile home park space ushers in new technology, like before we hit record, you and I were talking pay there are a lot of ways as mom and pops kind of get phased out of this industry. You’re going to have a wave of entrepreneurs like you and I in this space. And then what I think is going to happen after that is it’s going to consolidate and be basically private equity. And so in other words, where I think we are in the cycle of an already mature business, I think what you have is the ushering out of mom and pops and the ushering in of entrepreneurs who are willing to do crazy things like quite literally house hack their way into building a 20 lot mobile home park portfolio with no money to start out. And I think I’m not the only one, there’s tons of others. Folks I’ve met over the years that are willing to do some pretty bold things. And that’s not mobile home park-specific. I mean, you look at people starting internet companies in their parent’s garages. It’s no different. And to me, what that means is, is that people like you and I we’re going to come in, we’re going to not scheme money off the top. So we’re going to have good records. We’re going to pay our taxes. We are going to make it the highest and best use that parcel. And then from there, we’re going to get to what I consider the actual market for lot rents. So in other words, I have two wonderfully usefully degrees in statistics, so we can talk statistics all day long, but I love reading like 538.com, the statistician’s blog and webpage, and the really fun things with statistics beyond just analytics and like basketball and baseball is pricing. So, you know, the four PS of marketing pricing is one of them you have to properly price. And the fun thing is they have these algorithms that are over a decade old in some cases, and the newer ones are even cooler where they like will spot price ticket sales for baseball games. So like the San Francisco giants had a huge article a bunch of years ago about how they had these huge algorithms where they’re taking mountains of data. I’m talking like the weather, the pitchers, if they’re injured or not, what’s the extent of the injury. Did they just get back off the DL? Who they’re going against, what day of the week it is? Is it a night game, is it, what’s the temperature? And they basically are using advanced statistics to optimize pricing. So in other words, the price is going to be higher right before the game. The price is going to be lower if you buy it three months in advance, depending on if it’s playoff-worthy game, like all of these factors in this giant computer, getting a very, very precise price to literally optimize the price. And in our industry, we call Billy Bob’s trailer park down the road and ask him what his lot rent is and up, I guess that’s market, is Billy Bob, right? Maybe, but that’s certainly not a mountain of data in a computer, which is just going to be able to predict stuff. So there’s a lack of research. Charles Becker of Duke University is probably the only one that I could find that has done extensive research. And even his, he admits it’s got a lot of love that it’s got a lot of admitted. And so what I think is people like you and I are going to come in and we’re going to find what that right pricing is. And then you’re going to hit a ceiling of what is the real market at. And then if you believe in a free market capitalistic society, then you know that eventually when you hit that ceiling, the only way you get through that is by having capital influx. And that’s where you and I Ferd are going to say our goodbyes to the mobile home park space, because we will no longer, we will no longer be the best capital for those properties, because otherwise you’re stuck. You know, like they say in Batman, the dark Knight Harvey dent says, you either live die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. And I will use that quote in the mobile home park space. You either basically graduated hero and you sell off and you move on or you live long enough to become the mom and pop that we’re buying from.
Ferd Niemann: That’s funny.
Ryan Narus: So that’s kind of my take on this space.
Ferd Niemann: Well, I agree that we’re getting more and more consolidated and mom and pop are kind of getting pushed out and that’s, and in some respects, that’s sad, but in some respects, it is good because it’s going to allow for new capital, new professional management, new investment, a lot of these mobile home parks are 1930s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, failing infrastructure. We’re under contract right now in Iowa that we’re getting bids on replacing Orangeburg sewer. So it’s like, okay, this stuff is, yeah, this stuff is not going to last 25 more years. This may not last 25 more minutes. So, you know, we’re going to upgrade it. Mom and pop don’t have the resources or the desire to do it. So at some point, you know, the residents are going to be stuck with nowhere to live. We bought another park six months ago, it was listed for sale as a development ground. And we upped the rent pretty modest, like 8% or something. And it was like 50% of market, now it’s like 75% market. So we got to put it and one of the residents just mad as can be. And we told him like, you realize that this was listed a development ground, and we’re $150 cheaper than the competitor. So if this would have sold it, somebody that was going to turn it into apartments, where would you go then? And you’d pay $150 more if you could get there. So you know, in some respects we were his hero. He just hasn’t, doesn’t see us that way, but at least not yet, but I’m with you that the industry is going to just continue to become more professional. And yeah, I mean, I wonder when it’s going to fully consolidate and some of these private equity guys, I’m seeing are paying just through the roof pricing and they have different costs of capital, different, you know, investment metrics and consolidation such, but it’s definitely, I don’t think that I’m going to be the mom and pop, but I think I’m going to, at some point, be like, it’s irresponsible for me to keep it at the price that it’s worth. I mean, I wouldn’t buy any of our properties at the price that I could sell them for right now. But somebody else will. And I know I’m not selling them right now, but it’s just like, that’s just one of the market’s at right now. And we shall see if it stays or if it gets even hotter. But tell me about, you mentioned your story, Ryan, about how you and Ian got started. Tell me how that worked from your first deal. You said you didn’t have money. You didn’t have, you didn’t have a good net worth or any net worth. You didn’t have experience. So how’d you get the first deal? How’d you get the second deal? Is it through things like seller finance? Is it a joint venture? Did you syndicate, tell me about that deal. Or maybe not the first one, one of the, some of the first few, how you get started with my point being, it takes a village to get going on this business unless you just happened to be born into experience or money.
Ryan Narus: Our first deal ever, we got off-market, it was a pocket listing from a broker we had built a relationship with. So no excuses, by the way, I hear this all the time. Oh, brokers don’t take me seriously. Ah, we had nothing, no experience, no network, no money. And our first deal ever was this mysterious pocket listing that everybody talks about. We did that and we’ve bought plenty pocket listings off brokers since then. And we had no money. So what do we do? We did a joint venture with a group that could close the deal. And we basically took a cashed out in acquisition fee. So we had some live capital to play with. And then we left a sliver in. So as an LP, so we could see as a fly on the wall, how they did their thing, how they operated, cause we wanted to learn how to operate. So a mentor of mine said, let people pay you to solve your problems. That’s quite literally what happened. We said, we have no money. We have no knowledge of how to actually operate beyond what we’re learning online. Let’s literally find a deal and joint venture with a company, allow them to pay us while we learn from them. So in other words, we basically, like I said, we found someone to literally pay us to solve our own problem. Deal number two was a mailer that we bought in Asheville, North Carolina. And that was our first just Ian and I, and our friend behind the scenes who likes to stay really quiet. So Archimedes group is comprised of three of us. And so in other words, we’ve never actually had to syndicate, we’ve only done joint ventures, or we just keep it the three of us. And then our third was a behemoth. It was a 527 lot mobile home park, mom, and pop. They just liked us, there’s no other way to put it. They just liked us. And they told us they had an LOI for $1.5 million more than what we offered, and they still picked us. And the crazy thing is we know who made that $12 million offer. And he’s a friend of ours, great guy. And he will probably for the rest of our lives, remind us, gave them an LOI and they picked us. And anyways, so those were our first three. And that number three, we also did a joint venture with another big group and they allowed us to be the property managers. And just like the first deal we did, acquisition fee cash some of it out, leave some of it in. So that way we again had more capital to play with. And more importantly, we got full-time. So then our fourth one was a cold call. Our fifth one, it was a cold call. And then we just had a ring, no, we had a whole string of cold calls that converted flash-forward we’ve now bought 20 mobile home parks. We’ve sold out a three, we’re passive in one. So we actively managed 16 and we’ve bought a grand total of 18, a little shy of 1800 pads, all with nothing in under six years. So anybody listening in you have no excuses.
Ferd Niemann: That’s great, man. So I’m curious on the joint ventures with the bigger player, did you used the same one every time, or did you go to the market and you know, it’s not a syndication so to speak, but how’d you get that relationship started? Cause that’d be a next question for somebody that’s getting started is okay, well great, but you already know this guy, is this big player your brother-in-law? No, presumably not. How do I get in touch with that big, but how does the next guy find that guy, you know, or do you have to find a new one every time?
Ryan Narus: So what we did, so our first one, we just had a very limited network, and we had a good vibe, good rapport with friends of ours that we bought our first one with. But as we were LPs in that deal, we just basically kind of realized their strategy, we just didn’t really overly jive with us because we’re more value add people. And they were more looking for more stable stuff. And so we went, let’s find a group that is more like cool with projects, because that’s what we really want. Because in other words, if you have no money, like I say, on my podcast, mobile home parks in real life, I have a whole episode where I talk about how you can basically add rocket fuel to your net worth. And the answer is, you find multiplication of your capital, not preservation. So like growing up a middle-class person, reading all the middle-class philosophies on how you build wealth slowly over time with compounding interests, which isn’t wrong. It’s just, if you want to be a multi-millionaire in your twenties and thirties, you don’t get that by getting 7% with a low cost index fund. It doesn’t happen, now, will you be rich eventually? Yeah, sure, probably the math definitely checks out. But if you want to literally multiply your capital, you have no choice but to buy stuff pennies on the dollar. So we realized that that joint venture goals didn’t really align with ours. So in other words, we found a group that did, and like I mentioned earlier, you find someone to pay you to solve your problems. Well, their problem was that they were at a point where they were just stretched too far. So they wanted to grow. They had the capital and they basically went, we either need to hire basically a regional manager or Ian and Ryan can literally go and move into a colossal asset and basically run it for us. And these people are some of my best friends in the world to this day. And they will tell me this for the rest of my life. They’re like, that was a complicated project. You brought in RVs, new homes, old homes, you did conversions of homes. You did evictions, you did it all. And we never heard from you unless you wanted advice. They’re like, that was one of the most hands-off easy things to do. And what we got out of that was basically a master’s degree in how to operate mobile home parks. And what they got out of that is another 500 lots in a huge MSA, a total win for everybody around. And again, and now I have capital. Now I can go out and do it on my own.
Ferd Niemann: No, that’s great, man. Yeah, when I was first getting into some deals, I had several smaller deals on my own, but then my first bigger park was, it was about 110 spaces in the Kansas City, Metro, they weren’t, it was like 20 some occupied, but still had a big price tag and I needed a bunch of Cap ex and I was okay, I need to find a partner. And I didn’t have a lot of time to, I didn’t have a good network. So I actually tried to do what you did, just basically assign it to a big operator and then take a fee, but then put some of the fee in as LP to get under the tent. And they wouldn’t let me do it. They’re like, we’ll give you the fee and then we’ll give you more fee. I don’t want the fee. I want to get under the tent, and they are like, we already have investors and we’re not going to do that. So anyway, I didn’t sell it. I didn’t sell it to them. I ended up syndicating it and raising the money. And it’s going to work out a lot better for me financially, but it was, it was like, I tried to go that team route, and he’s told me no thanks. So it doesn’t always work. But that’s where plan B came in, it was a syndicate and raising money from other folks and ended up getting it done. But tell me, give me some more tips and tricks. I know you and Ian have a mentor program too, and you do coaching through that. Is that something you want to discuss or other team-building strategies, what comes to mind?
Ryan Narus: You know, I’m happy to talk about my mentorship program. We’ve been unofficially mentoring people for years. I am a giver. I absolutely loved this space. It is what I meant to do when I grow up and I thoroughly enjoy helping people absolutely for free, but we calculate, we counted it up because we were tracking, we had unofficially mentored over 200 people in the span of like two or three years. And what we realized was like 95% of them never ended up buying anything and eventually left the space. And we’re like, I remember one guy really just broke my heart because I talked to him every day or every week for at least an hour. He was my ride to Atlanta, Georgia from Charlotte, North Carolina and back. And he was like, Oh, I don’t owe you anything. I’m like, no, you’re helping me kill time, dude. This is great. Never ended up buying anything and has now completely out of space. And it just broke my heart knowing I spent so much time with that individual. And it just made me realize through time that that 5%, that actually does take action and actually does get somewhere, having a mentor like me, where I’ve already been through that. I’ve bootstrapped the company to almost 2000 lots with nothing. Like I would be a wonderful person to just sit down, pop open the hood of what you got going on and let’s figure it out. And so that’s our mentorship program is we got an interview process and we only take on a handful of folks because quite frankly owning and operating mobile home parks is quite a lot more lucrative. I’m not a teacher. I want to be a real estate investor. This is what I do and operator like, this is what I do. So we have the mentorship thing on the side. You’re welcome to anyone listening in that wants more information. It’s www.mobilehomeparkmentors.com, definitely apply. I mean, if this is what you’re meant to do and you’re ready to go all in, that’s it. But you know, beyond that, Ferd, I just, I mean this, I absolutely love helping others, period. My residents, people looking to get into this space, people already in this space, like I don’t, like my reward is literally helping you makes me happy. And what makes me even happier is when you go and take my advice and it works. That’s like the biggest compliment ever. I’m so proud of one of my mentees, Victor, he literally, on Tuesday of this week, he has a deal he was negotiating. He was like, I offered him 1.25, and then the brother got involved and now they want 1.5. What should I do? And so we underwrote it together and I was like, you could do 1.5. It’s like a single, maybe a walk. It’s not a great deal. 2.5 is like a solid double or triple to use baseball references. Cause I see you got the baseball thing in the back. I’m a baseball fan too. And I got a brag on him because he was like, Ryan, what do I do here? And I was like, if you don’t have a child, this may not make sense to you, but you have to set up boundaries because your child, as a father, I know this, I love my son, but boy, he’s going to poke and prod and pick until I say no stop. Otherwise he doesn’t know where the boundaries are, and adults behave pretty similarly. And I told him, I was like, if you just say yes to that, they’re going to go, oh man, we should ask for 2 million, right? Like you have to set up that boundary in negotiations. And so I was like, and also, you’re going to look like a doofus. If you offered 1.25, and they just go, Oh, okay, I’ll do 1.5. Guess what happens? And then they go, all right, were you ripping me off at 1.25? No, here’s the negotiation tip. Okay, we’ll go up. I’ll make you a counteroffer. I’ll counter your counter. But I’m getting something for that. I told him, I was like, Victor, you go get something for this. And he was like, the next day he said, I have a contract signed for 1.4 and I went and how’d you do it? And he said, I did exactly what you said. I said, I’m getting something for this. I’ll pay up. I am paying up. I felt like 1.25 was a fair deal. But I’m buying something for an extra $150,000 and that’s your ink on this contract right now and they said, yes. And I was like, that’s the best feeling for me. Like knowing you listened and then you did it. And then it works. Oh my gosh, I love helping people.
Ferd Niemann: That’s great, man. Yeah, I like doing it too. And I have people call me all the time for advice. What I tell people is you don’t have to take my advice, but I charge the same either way. I don’t care if you take it, I do care if you take it. But it’s just amazing people are like, eh, whatever. I’ll do my own thing. And then they’ll call me later and be like, yeah, I didn’t do what you said. But there was a good reason at least I thought, well, it didn’t, I should have done what you said. How do I fix it? And it’s like, okay, now it’s going to cost more. And sometimes you can’t fix it. It’s like you should’ve taken the last advice. But I had a client not do a phase one environmental, despite me telling him like, I’ll just worry about it on the next deal. I was just like, what/ what if the steel has cancer? You save two grand. Yeah, and he had the money. He’s just like, well, I want to close faster. I want to close next week, and the guy said it can take three weeks or something. I’m like, good grief, man. Take the advice. But anyway, being a mentor, being part of team is fun. I used to, I don’t, I haven’t counted all the people I mentored. But one thing is you talked about boundaries, I had to put in place. I like to say right here, guard your time. Because if you don’t guard your time, people will steal it. I’ll walk the parks and tenants will be like, oh my gosh, they think I’m the manager from headquarters. This is a big manager. Let me, they want to tell him everything under the sun. Look, I don’t mind talking to you, but I can’t stand here for an hour and you can. And with mentees, I used to have that problem where people say, Oh, I used to do single family housing. And people would say, let me buy you a cup of coffee, we want to pick your brain for two hours and then they’d never buy a house. They didn’t make an offer. I was like, how am I giving me, I don’t mind investing in you, but I do mind wasting it in you. So some sort of threshold. So I started to say, I’d give them a couple of books to read and say, go read rich dad, poor dad, go read, never eat alone, go read some of these other books on business and finance and real estate. And I said, if you’re serious if you can read, I read 25 books this year. I said, if you can read three and write me a two-page synopsis of each, I’ll give you two hours of my time. And you know what ? Only one guy did it.
Ryan Narus: That’s awesome.
Ferd Niemann: One guy. And he was the guy that he would begin investment part of me. But then our guys, they just, they are just it and he still is, you know, they just didn’t do it. So it was kind of like a litmus test of effort. I think that’s key to a team. Is, you know, I say rowing together or yoked together. Like I don’t want to be running at a different pace than everybody else. You need to keep up or you need to go elsewhere. And I think it’s the same way as a mentor program or, you know, investors or joint ventures is everybody doing their part and everybody hustling and Rowing together.
Ryan Narus: It’s like a poker game. If you’re playing Texas Hold’em no limit poker with no buy-in, you just treat it differently than even if you bet a dollar. And if you bet 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, you better believe your phone is going to go in your pocket and on silent, not on vibrate, you are laser-focused. So yeah, you have to give them some type of buy-in. It’s a great way to kind of just screen out tire kickers. Like I hate to say it, but I was a tire kicker. Ferd I looked at over a hundred businesses to start in that three-year period from 2012 to 2015, 2011 to 2015, that plus or minus three year period, I looked at over a hundred businesses. I was a tire kicker. And this is, I say this, and it falls on deaf ears. And I expect it to, you need to know who you are because you will quit if you’re just chasing after a buck or you’re chasing after the features and the benefits and not the underlying asset. Because if you’re just chasing passive income. Let me tell you something. Tim Ferriss has a great book called the four-hour workweek, where he can tell you all about automated systems and internet companies. And you can have your passive income and probably arguably make much better returns. Because if you’re starting an online company for a couple of hundred bucks, you could multiply that like it’s nothing. So in other words, if you know, my big thing Ferd is, I really thoroughly enjoy helping others. I really thoroughly think from the bottom of my heart, that we have an affordable housing crisis in this country. And I have had some horrible days, horrible days, days where I want to just, everything is horrible. It just is awful. And the reason why I get up and I’m excited to work every single day is because I know I am fighting to keep people safe and clean. I’m going to preserve their, in other words, I’m not going to let it get redeveloped and I’m going to enhance it. We’re going to do things like partner with so they can build their credit. We have a partial college scholarship. So if anybody wants to go get a higher education and better themselves, I will help you pay for that. We do free food giveaways. We show our faces. I was onsite at four of my properties yesterday, walking around, talking to residents. I still do that to this day. Like I’m going to give them the best experience that I can again, while the highest and best use of this property is me owning it. And I think it’s a little bit of blasphemy to say, I’m not a long-term holder of most assets. I mean, it’s true. Eventually, eventually I be a mom and pop. Eventually capital is going to need to come in. Eventually I’m not going to have depreciation to shield income anymore. Eventually septics are going to fail. Homes are going to need to be replaced. And that’s just going to cost a lot, a lot of money and my capital will need to be recycled. So lots of stuff to pick apart there.
Ferd Niemann: No lots of good nuggets there, your point on, you know, don’t be a tire kicker reminds me of a quote. You know, they’ll quote knowledge is power and that’s wrong. Knowledge is potential power, execution kicks knowledge’s butt every day of the week. And I know a lot of people out there who are exceptionally bright and have tons of knowledge and they’re just going nowhere fast and loving the ride cause they don’t take the action. And you know, decisiveness is a key trait of an entrepreneur, of a leader. And just of a successful person, unless you’re an academia or some sort of you know, union where you just kind of flatness across the agency. It’s like, if you want to go somewhere, you got to, you know, get smart, right. Gain the knowledge, gain wisdom, and take action or it’s kind of worthless in my mind.
Ryan Narus: I think you’ll appreciate this. So the reason why I have two degrees in statistics that I don’t use anymore, because I fell in love with statistics because of this reason, there’s a thing called P hacking in research where basically if you don’t have a 90% or 95% confidence in what your findings are, that is, it is actually the truth is thrown out. And so basically people would exploit statistics to try to get research published because they’ll be so close, they’ll be like 89% sure and nobody’s going to take you seriously. And I remember I was a psych major undergrad and at first, I thought I was going to get my PhD and be a college professor like my dad. I just, I love public speaking. I love teaching people. I love helping others. I figured I could dedicate myself to a cause and I realized I hated research. I hated it. And I hated it because I could find something where I’m 89% sure that it’s that this is the right answer, 89% and no peer-review journal would ever take me seriously. And what I realized was as a poker player, if you can win 51% of the time, law of large numbers says you will make money in the long run. So in other words, I just, I doubled down on statistics because I just fell in love with it. And I said goodbye to research because I went, this is stupid. I’m going to go out and find a way where I can basically find something that works consistently, not all the time, but works consistently has some risks, but also has some reward that other people aren’t going to charge at for various reasons. And I’m going to go and kick butt and take names and do that. And everybody’s a tire kicker. Everybody’s a tire kicker. I was a tire kicker for around about a hundred different companies until I found mobile home parks. It is okay to come to the conclusion that mobile home parks are not for you. That’s okay. That is an okay outcome. If it’s a multiple-choice test and you eliminate answer C you go from a 20% chance to randomly guess the answer to a 25% chance to randomly guess the answer. And if there’s an E, all of the above, you’re now at a 33% chance to randomly guess. So in other words, eliminating things that you’re not truly passionate about is a good answer. That is a good outcome. And you just, you know, I’m like you man. I used to read 50 books a year and I stopped that after reading, I don’t know X number of books, X number of hundreds of books. And I just because books started to sound the same to me. And now I’m slowly starting to get back into it because I realized I was getting bad recommendations for books. And like, I just finished the alchemists, which I got from a friend of mine and I loved it. I’m like I stopped everything just to finish that book. That was amazing. I’m reading a Malcolm Gladwell book now. I love Malcolm. So like every, you got to read, you got to read, you got to do that. But I think when it came down to it, I just, I went, you know what? I’m not looking for perfect. I’m not looking even for 95% confidence. I’m not even looking for 90% confidence. If I can consistently find 51% confidence in something, I’ve got an idea and I can run with it. I just need to make sure I love it.
Ferd Niemann: No, man, I don’t disagree. Great stuff. I mean, plus the general patents is something along the lines of don’t let the perfect plan tomorrow ruin a good plan today, that can be executed violently. So it’s like, yeah, paralysis by analysis is not the way to do it in this business, at least. No, that’s good, man. I appreciate it. Before we go, any other tips or tricks you want to share anything else to contribute? If not, where can people find you? I know you mentioned your website, but any other way you want to promote your address or.
Ryan Narus: Listen, I’m a Tupac fan. And so I’ll quote Tupac, I ain’t hard to find. My name is Ryan Narus. It’s a Lithuanian last name from what I can find it is, I’m the only Ryan Narus in the world. If you Google Ryan Narus, N-A-R-U-S my LinkedIn pops up, my websites pop up. I’ve been on over 70 podcasts. Like I’m tattooed over the internet, like crazy. I am not a hard person to find. And I want you to find me. That is by design. I do, I really truly love networking and helping others. I don’t need anything from you unless you want to spend an hour plus a week with me. Then I have a mentorship program, but I utterly love, I’m passionate about helping others and that’s, Ferd I want to die, I want to be on my death bed thinking back on my life. And I’m not going to be thinking about how much money I made or all these accolades I won. I’m going to be thinking back on my life going, I came into this, the world was like this, and I left it a little bit cleaner and a little bit better because I was in it and that’s my life goal. So come find me. My podcast is Mobile Home Parks In Real Life, Archimedes group, YouTube. I got a ton of videos of me walking around my parks, just talking about stuff. My LinkedIn Ian’s LinkedIn is chock full of just nuggets. And I would say, if I’m going to leave folks with any tips, I would say that beyond just my podcasts, where I spend like a half-hour plus going into how to convert mobile homes, how to infill homes, how to do collections, how to boost your net worth like beyond, you know, tenant-owned homes versus park-owned homes beyond all of that, I would say I could boil down to two things that prevent real action takers. I’m not talking about tire kickers. I’m talking about real action-takers from getting started or plateauing. And that’s number one, your strategy’s wrong. And a lot of times strategy is wrong because you don’t really know yourself or what you’re after where your comfort zone is today, where it could be tomorrow, and where it’s never going. And number two beyond strategy is underwriting. And trust me, I know a lot of fabulously talented underwriters that have that do that lack of vision. And if you lack vision, Excel is only going to tell you what you put in it. Microsoft Excel, someone said Microsoft, more allies have been written in Microsoft or more fiction has been written in Microsoft Excel than Microsoft word. It is because you don’t realize garbage in garbage out. That being said, knowing how to do the math is very important because if your machine doesn’t work, so in other words, the math wall it’s important. To me what I see is a lack of strategy and a lack of vision in underwriting, what you can do where your skills and passions lie to get you to that next level. So if this is it, and this is all you’re ever going to hear in my voice, just take those two things away, make sure you have a rock-solid strategy. So like for just said there you can make, you can be decisive and quick and then make sure you’re pairing vision with proper underwriting. You don’t need to spend four days underwriting something. You can do it in five minutes or less on my website. Or at least you can email me. I have a thing called the five-minute valuator, which is literally just like put on the lot rent, put in this, put in that, boom! It’s going to tell you, should I spend four days going through a complicated model to pitch to banks and investors? Yes or no. So in other words, if you can make decisions like that in five minutes or less, this is a seller’s market right now. The brevity wins deals, getting things inked and inked quickly and inked, not verbal agreements. I’m talking wet ink on a contract. So you’re in due diligence. That is how you win deals. Cause I got to tell you, most of the deals that I’ve bought in the last six months have been bidding Wars. And again, it’s not because I’m better at the math underwriting. I’m better at division. And it’s not that I’m like sitting on a billion dollars. It’s that I have a very crisp, unique strategy so I can move quickly. So that, and plenty more if you reach out to me, I’m happy to help anyone listening.
Ferd Niemann: All right. I appreciate it, man. Thanks again.
Ryan Narus: Thanks for having me.
Ferd Niemann: You got it.
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