Intro speaker: Welcome to the Westside Investors Network. Win, your community of investing knowledge for growth. This is the Real Estate Professionals Investing podcast for real estate professionals by real estate professionals. This show is focused on the next step in your career, investing. Thank you for listening. And please, if you like our content, rate us on your podcast provider. Just a quick disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are for educational purposes only and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any shares or securities, make or consider any investments, or take any other action. Trent Werner: Welcome back to another episode of the Deal Deep Dive segment on the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. In this segment, our featured guests will share their unique stories on a specific deal they've invested in. We will dive deep into finding the deal, financing the deal, writing an offer, and the due diligence. Do us a solid and smash that subscribe button, leave us a rating, and share this episode. And now, let's dive deep. Welcome back to the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. Today, we are joined by Sean O'Dowd of Scholastic Capital. Sean's gonna share his story investing in single family real estate with his now wife and turning that idea and concept into a full on fund with a partner at Scholastic Capital. Their model consists of buying single family homes in high level school districts and renting them on longer term leases. Now let's welcome Sean O'Dowd. Alright. We got Sean O'Dowd with Scholastic Capital joining the Westside Investors Network podcast today. Sean, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Sean O'Dowd: Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this. Trent Werner: So Sean has a very interesting business model, which we will hear more about later on in our conversation. Scholastic Capital, his company, buys single family houses in great school districts and rents them out long term. Again, we will get more into the details on that here shortly, but I wanna hear about Sean O'Dowd. And did you start off in real estate straight out of college? Did you have a different career that led you to real estate? Who is Sean O'Dowd? Sean O'Dowd: Yeah. So I, I did have a different career when I got out of college, although real estate was kind of a a when not if situation. So I I moved 22 times before I went to college. So that was my, like, initial exposure to real estate. It was, oh, like, finding a new place to live is this super fun thing that my family was doing every, like, 8, 9 months. So I got super into it, and super interested in real estate because of that. But right out of school, I, I went to, like, a business school for for school for college, and I worked for a consulting firm right out of school, before getting back into real estate. Trent Werner: And how long did you do consulting before getting back into real estate? Sean O'Dowd: I was with a big firm for 2 years and then I was independent for about two and a half years. So I was doing the consulting for about 4, 5 years, although I was buying real estate on the side with the money I was making from my job. Trent Werner: Very nice. And a lot of people, you might be in the same boat, but they start buying real estate while they're working. And typically, they're buying single family homes or small multifamily. What were you adding to your portfolio during that time? Sean O'Dowd: So I I did 2 different things. My I was buying them with my now wife, actually. We bought our first property together before we were engaged, which probably was not the smartest thing in the world in case it didn't work out, but we did do that together. We bought 2 small multifamilies, and then we bought 3 single family houses, 2 very different strategies. And the the goal was to kind of test and drive both of them, and we, really didn't like the multifamily strategy. We ended up with, like, the single family strategy. Trent Werner: Very nice. And tell me a little bit more about Scholastic Capital. What is Scholastic, and where does well, 1, where does the name come from? Because I'm curious. And 2, what do you guys focus on? Sean O'Dowd: Yeah. So the name comes from, my partner actually came up with a name, And, gentleman named Michael, he's in the GP with me. And he came up with the name. And the reason why it's Scholastic capital is we're intentionally buying homes only in a really high end school district areas. There's a bunch of reasons why, but it's it's a really cool part to our thesis is we only buy in those specific neighborhoods. And for that reason, we we figured we might as well go with the Scholastic Capital name for the the school district type. Trent Werner: I love it. And how many deals do you guys have, in your current portfolio? Sean O'Dowd: We've got 21 homes. It's about 11 and a half $1,000,000 worth of real estate worth, and we're we're buying about 4 to 5 homes a month right now. So we we we we just started buying under the fund model about 4 or 5, 6 months ago, and we're we're scaling up pretty quickly. Trent Werner: Very nice. So today, the deal that we're gonna focus on is one from a couple years ago. I do wanna touch on some of your more recent stuff here in a little bit. But you mentioned that you had a deal from a couple years ago that you purchased with this idea and this concept and this model, located in Illinois. Tell me about this one. Sean O'Dowd: Yep. So this was one of the first deals that my wife and I personally bought to kinda test this thesis. It's now part of the fund. So this deal, it's a single family home and a really high end school district in Illinois. We bought it for $440,000, 3 bed, 3 bath, 1900 square feet. Trent Werner: Very nice. And how did you purchase this deal? Sean O'Dowd: So this was MLS. So we we bought it off the MLS because we only buy in really good school districts and because we're buying homes with the intention of trying to sell them to a larger institution down the line. There's not a lot of neighborhoods we can buy in, and there's not there's a lot of very specific things that we're looking for in each house, which means when we see something on the market and it actually passes all the filters, we we tend to know immediately. So this home hit the MLS and, I was in the living room like 30 minutes later. We were under contract probably 2, 3 hours after that. Trent Werner: And what is your criteria other than high end school districts? Sean O'Dowd: So within within the, like, where we wanna buy, there's there's a bunch of different things, but at its core, it's like we want really big school districts. That's our demand drivers. There's a bunch of data still when we're doing that. On the supply side, we're only buying homes in areas where the owner occupancy rate is 80, 80 5, 90% or higher. In the country, it's around 60, 65%. And we're doing that intentionally because then we're gonna be sitting in a supply demand imbalance. A lot of people wanna get in there. Not a lot of rentals available. We're the only game in town. If you want the good school district, we can take a take a higher price premium as a result. And then we're only buying in the upper Midwest because we we think that's gonna have the best chance of institutional exit. That's on the where we're buying on the home specific side of things. We've got, like, 17, 18 different criteria that we're looking for. Gotta be at least 3 bedrooms, gotta be at least 1 and a half bath, smaller than 3,000 square feet, above a 1000 square feet, the kind of standard ones. On top of that speed limit, it's gotta be on a speed the speed limit is 25 miles an hour or less. Can't have solar panels on the house, no pools at the house, things like that, that we need to keep in mind because if we we broke we break those rules, we won't be able sell that home to a larger institution down the line. Trent Werner: Very interesting. I didn't I didn't know that. So, I mean, clearly, you guys have thought about the criteria and, have found, you know, plenty of of deals within that criteria. You said that you only focus on the upper Midwest. Are you in Illinois only, or are you in all the different upper Midwest states? Sean O'Dowd: So we own homes right now in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, and we're actively looking in Minnesota and Michigan as well. So that that's that's gonna be our bread and butter. We we may expand to Ohio, may expand to Pennsylvania, but those those are our core 5 states that, basically, Hugging and Great Lakes. Trent Werner: And and where are you located at? Where's your company located at? Sean O'Dowd: We're we're in the Sheraton River Suburbs. Trent Werner: Okay. So you're familiar with with the area, obviously. When it comes to identifying these, upper end school districts that aren't, you know, right by you, how are you going about finding these different neighborhoods? Sean O'Dowd: There's there's a bunch of data. So we there's some things that, like, we have to use. So, like, GreatSchools, for example, which is the one that ranks schools out of 10, like, integrates with Zillow. We have to look at that one because that's we're renting homes on Zillow, so it needs to be be good there. But we found a bunch of other datasets. For example, the one that's best is we have a dataset that shows what percent of the high school graduating class goes to Harvard, MIT, or Stanford. And that if you have a there's a certain percentage threshold or if you have above a certain percent of the graduating class going to those 3 schools, it means, like, a lot of the kids in that school district are going to really great colleges, and that's a big driver of rental value. So, I mean, most of our tenants move in when their eldest child is 14 because they're about to start high school. The parents want the kids to go to good high schools. They go to good college. If the college list is matching where like, what parents want their kids to be going through, then there's a there's this much more significant rental premium bump that comes out from there. Trent Werner: Very interesting. Now let's talk about, you know, obviously we've heard your criteria. We we know that you're buying in good school districts when it comes to the ultimate return of this property, first question I have is how long is your typical lease when you do acquire a new property and how long second question is how long does it take to get leased out after acquisition? Sean O'Dowd: Yeah. So our average lease right now is 27 months. So call it two and a half years. 2 years and change is our standard lease. Regarding time to lease, it's been variable, But on average, it goes pretty quickly. Like, the the fastest we've ever leased a home is literally an hour where somebody really wanted to live in school district. We were the only game in town. Like, they didn't even see it. They're just like, Done, signed up $45100 a month. Great. We've had some homes that take 6 weeks or so because we've made a mess we misjudged on whether or not that was the right home for us to buy, and, like, we made a mistake in the underwriting. So it's a big range on average. I'll have to pull the exact number, but I would guess a week to 2 weeks is our average leasing time right now. Trent Werner: And then typically, you know, in a, I guess, $45100 a month is a pretty good rental rate, especially in the Midwest. I hear 45100, I think in New York, Miami, and LA or San Francisco. How do you identify, I guess, the rental rate that you're gonna be able to charge? Because again, I I think of Midwest, and I don't think $45100 a month for a 3 bedroom house. So how are you able to to find those deals that are gonna rent for $45100 a month? Sean O'Dowd: That's the hardest that's the hardest challenge for us and why the underwriting is is hard. And we we we aren't batting a 1,000 on the underwriting because you can't use, like, a rentometer or a rent cast in these areas because those are looking at comps in the area to get a new rental estimate. If we're intentionally buying areas that are 90 plus percent owner occupied, means there are no rental comps in the area. So it's really hard to kind of judge. What we have to do is we have to, for lack of better words, like, stretch the existing comps that we do have to get the most possible data from them. For example, if you go on Zillow and look at rental homes, you can see the number of days the homes went on the market, the number of contacts per day, and the number of application. The number of contacts and number of applications. And we we have a, a full time team member overseas who is literally scraping that data manually every day. Because because we can look at it and be like, okay, this home was listed at $35100. It's been on the market 3 days. It's had 75 people contact them and 12 applications. Like, that home's probably under priced. If you've got that many applications and contacts in a day or 2. Or, like, inversely, if it's been on the market for a month and nobody's contacted, like, this home's probably overpriced. So we're we're collecting that data, and that is a big part of our of our rental rental underwriting price process. Trent Werner: And do you guys have specific KPIs or or metrics that you're tracking on, I guess, target number of of views and contacts and applications per day or per week? Sean O'Dowd: We do. We do have thresholds. They differ depending on ZIP code because some ZIP codes are bigger than others, where there's just more there's more houses. So, we would wanna see higher contact numbers per day for a bigger ZIP code versus a smaller one. But, like, a pretty good benchmark is, like, you wanna be around 5. Like, 5 contacts per day is, like, okay. There's there's pretty significant demand. And if you assume a funnel of, like, 5 people contact, 1 to 2 end up going on a tour, and then of the people that tour, maybe 25 to 30% submit an application that's good enough to be accepted. Then it's like, okay. We can kind of back out a funnel of, like, what we need from a contacts perspective to on a on a daily basis over, say, 10 to 20 day period to get the home based stuff. Ad speaker: And now here's a word from our sponsor. Get things done while you're on the move. Learn more about working with a virtual assistant through off-site professionals. It's a great way to get all the things done that you need to get done. Have freedom in your time and streamline your life by automating your business. Stop spending time on the task that you can delegate and start spending more time on your superpower. Call us today at 503-446 3177, or visit our website at offsiteprofessionals.com. Trent Werner: Uptown syndication is now offering a syndication coaching program for you to take your real estate portfolio to the next level. This is your opportunity to have experienced syndicators, AJ and Chris Shepherd, coach you on your way to controlling your real estate investing future. Our coaching program will provide you with the tools and framework needed to begin syndicating real estate in your target market. Go to uptownsyndication.com today to learn more. And I know, like, in our market here in the Portland metro area in Oregon, we definitely have and we have an in house property management company. So I'm I'm pretty familiar with the daily views and contacts and inquiries and all that stuff. For us, we have, you know, once you get over $3 a month for a house, typically that lead flow is going to drop. Do you find in your markets where maybe if it's under $4 a month or under 35100 a month, you're seeing that or what's where's your threshold at when it comes to price per month on your rental rates? Sean O'Dowd: It's pretty different by zip code. Our average right now, our average rent is a touch under $36100 a month. We've got some that are well north of 4 grand, and we've got some that are hovering around that 3 grand mark depending on ZIP code. What the the biggest driver for us has been just the number of other listings in town. Like, once you get above, like, 3 listings in town, it's it's harder to kind of take price at at whatever number we want. When we're the only game in town, it's a lot easier to to push the push the price because we're we're the only rental available at that point. Trent Werner: Yeah. That makes sense. Alright. Now back to this this deal in Illinois, obviously, 3 bedroom rented for, you said, $45100 a month? Sean O'Dowd: So this one was 35100. The 35100. 45100 was the one that rented very quickly. Trent Werner: Okay. Okay. Sean O'Dowd: This is 35100. Yeah. Trent Werner: So $35100 a month, 2 and a or you said average 27 month, lease. Mhmm. Sean O'Dowd: What do Trent Werner: you remember what this lease started at? Sean O'Dowd: This one was a 3 year lease. Trent Werner: Okay. Do you have, like, annual rent increases worked into your leases then? Okay. Sean O'Dowd: We do. We do have annual rent on the leases. This one's, a $100 a month. What we found is if you, if you do it at, like, a $100 a month, I would say, like, okay. That like, I can understand it. If you try to do, like, 3% annual rent escalators, then the numbers don't perfectly tie, and the tenants are like, why is my rent $3,612 or whatever it might be. Trent Werner: Yeah. Okay. And then in terms of management and operating these deals, we're gonna use this one in particular because we're talking about it. Mhmm. Do you have in house property management for for your portfolio? Sean O'Dowd: We use a third party property management company. Trent Werner: And is your 3rd party management company available in all the different areas that you are currently in, or do you have multiple different property managers? Sean O'Dowd: So they they are available in all the different areas that we're in. They're, they're a national company. Trent Werner: Okay. Very nice. Also very easy for you guys. Sean O'Dowd: Makes it easy. Trent Werner: So talking about the metrics, $35100 a month, you have a third party management company. What does typical maintenance and expenses look like for your deals, in in the single family portfolio that you have? Sean O'Dowd: So we we have a matrix that we use, and we got this from one of our advisors. But, on one axis of the matrix, it has the decade that the home was built, the vintage. And then on the other axis of the matrix, it's got the square footage of, the home. So we can say, hey. For 19 eighties, 2,000 square foot home, we want we're gonna expect this. For, 2010, a 1000 square foot home, we're gonna expect this because it's just gonna be a very different maintenance amount. On average right now for our portfolio, it's around $260 per home per month of maintenance is what we're escrowing. But it works out to be, a little over $3 a year per home is for a 17,060 square foot home. That's about what we're budgeting and what we're seeing across historical spend. Trent Werner: Okay. And then for this Illinois deal, obviously, you had to underwrite it. What were you projecting in terms of rental rates and, I guess, expense ratios or just, I guess, overall NOI for this deal? Sean O'Dowd: So we we were underwriting around $35100 a month on rent. So it ended up landing about lower than what we expected. Our agents thought we were nuts because there's no comps. So they're like, we think it's gonna be, like, 26100 because that was the only comp. We're like, no. We think we're gonna get 35. So underwrite at 35. Expense ratio, we had at 35% as well. It's 35 to 35. And that's that's largely tracked out to, where it's taken out to be. Trent Werner: Very nice. And so you bought this off the MLS. Did you pay cash for it or was it financed? Sean O'Dowd: We did finance the home. We did, 35% down payment. There's 353535, which makes it very easy to remember. But it's 35% down payment, 65% LTV. And we we exclusively use 30 year fixed debt. A lot of other SFR funds try to get a little bit more creative and get a little more aggressive in their debt, but we exclusively use the 3rd year fixed. Trent Werner: And what were you projecting the cash flow on a monthly and annual basis for this one? Sean O'Dowd: So for us, the the threshold for is, 6 and a half unlevered yields and cost is what we what we're looking for. But when we buy it, this one ended up being, a little bit higher. We were we were at almost double digits on levered yield and cost for the 1st 2 years. If you base it off of actual expenses, we were still escrowing for if you escrow for actual, maintenance that hasn't happened but will happen, it was, mid 7s. Trent Werner: Okay. And is that pretty typical across your portfolio? Sean O'Dowd: That's about right. Like, we we wanna shoot for that 6 and a half 11 year on cost is is the real kind of magic number we're looking for. So this one was a particularly good one, I think driven by the fact that the maintenance incident rate has been relatively low. But, that's exactly that number of, like, 6a half is the kind of the magic number for us. Trent Werner: And then how long do you anticipate holding a deal or I guess this deal? I'll ask you another question here in a second. Sean O'Dowd: We're gonna hold it we're gonna hold it until we sell everything as a portfolio if we do. We we we believe strongly we'll get more value for the portfolio, the more homes that are in it. So we don't wanna sell homes one off unless there's a situation where like a home burns down and we decide to sell the lot off instead of, rebuilding the house. Trent Werner: And I get I guess that leads me to my other question of being a fund model. You're able to do this because you have all these different assets that are owned by the fund. And so your investors can, you know, get into the fund and are immediately getting, I guess, interest in the overall fund. Correct? Sean O'Dowd: That's right. So if we have make the math easy. Let's say it's a $10,000,000 fund. The investor gives us a $1,000,000. Like, they own 10% of the underlying fund. So they get 10% of the cash flow from really from the jump. And then we've got, we've got that $10,000,000 to then go out and deploy and buy houses with. Trent Werner: And what is Scholastic Capital's overall goal in terms of, I guess, fund size or number of units? Do you guys have goals? I'm assuming you do. Sean O'Dowd: We do. So for because we wanna do that, we wanna sell the portfolio down the line. We really need to get to a minimum of a 100 houses. That's the the threshold where where somebody somebody serious would start taking a look at the portfolio. At 250 homes, they would be pretty interested. And at 500 homes, they would be, like, very interested. So we we need to get to at least 100. 250 would be better. Like, 500 is is best case scenario. Trent Werner: And you said you're buying on average 4 homes a month right now? Sean O'Dowd: Yep. That's about right. And average home right now is worth about 520 grand. So 500 homes would be would be about a $250,000,000 worth of real estate is, kind of the ideal threshold to get up to. Trent Werner: So I'm gonna ask you this question because it's kind of a hot topic for people listening to this in the future. We are recording this in October of 2024. So just keep that in mind. Home prices have been all over the news over the last, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 years going through the roof. You know, everything's more expensive. Clearly this model is still working for you in your markets. Why do you think you're able to continue to to run this model when home prices across the country are up crazy amount right now? Sean O'Dowd: It's it's a good question. The way that we think about it is the way it works is accessibility. So for the vast majority of our tenants, they're interested in moving into the ZIP code typically for high school. And then once they're out of the kids are out of the house, the parents are empty nesters, parents move to Florida or somewhere else. So for that reason, if you're if you're looking to move into one of these really good school districts for 4 years or 6 years for multiple kids and your choices are pay $36100 a month in rent or buy a house for a $1,000,000, jumbo loan, $250 down payment at a minimum, plus you're gonna have transaction costs when you try to sell it 4 or 6 years later, you're probably gonna lose money. Like, in most cases, the renting makes more sense for just about everybody to do. And Our our two most common jobs out of our tenants are software engineer and doctoring. So they're doing the math. They're they're smart folks. They're looking at it and be like, hey. If I if I have those choices, like, renting is the smarter choice for me to do. As long as that buy versus rent math continues to hold, like we should theoretically be well positioned for those tenants who are here for a short period of time, but a short but kind of defined period of time. Trent Werner: And have your yield to cost numbers been squeezed at all with rates being where they're at? Or are you, I guess, buying rates down or doing anything in addition to just conditional or or nor normal financing to make numbers work, or are you just leaving them how they are? Sean O'Dowd: We're because we're we're buying enough, we have, for lack of words, like, negotiated better terms with lenders because they're they're getting a lot of a lot of work from us. So the our average our weighted average interest rate right now in the portfolio is 615. And, that's the average 30 year fixed rate in house about 7 and change. 7.02 is what I saw the the print was this morning. So we are we are getting much better rates just because we're we're buying buying bulk. Trent Werner: Okay. So if you, you know, let's say because a lot of people are talking in 2026, you know, rates should be in the mid fives. Is there any any, I guess, scenario where you would go look at doing a bulk refinance and getting more cash into that the fund? Sean O'Dowd: There is. We we absolutely would do that if rates make sense to do. The challenge is we we've seen some other funds that have, like, promised their investors, like, we're gonna do this. We're definitely gonna refinance, and, like, we don't wanna make that promise because we don't it's kind of out of our control and if rates do get to that point. But if they do, we're absolutely gonna try to do that just to refresh lower rates and see if we can bring some money out either to then give it back to our investors or go buy more homes away. Trent Werner: Yep. And what's as an investor in your fund, what are they looking at? What are the the returns that they're able to achieve? Sean O'Dowd: Yep. So our our total forecasted return is 15.1% IRR, and we they get there via, the distribution. So we send out distributions monthly on the cash flow and then the investor also owns the underlying equity. So as we pay off the mortgage, as the homes appreciate, if we whereas we sell them down the line, like, they'll get their their equity as well. Trent Werner: And is there a preferred return at all? Sean O'Dowd: There is. So we have an 8% preferred return. So investors get 100% of everything until they've made 8% of their money. And then after the 8%, it's a 80 20 split. So they get 80¢ on the dollar, and we get 20¢ on the dollar. Trent Werner: Very nice. And then last question I have, just because I'm curious and wanna know more about your your business here. What is what is the new what are the new homes that you're buying looking like? Are they drastically different in terms of metrics from the house that we talked about in Illinois from 2 years ago? Is it more of the same? What is your current additions and acquisitions look like right now? Sean O'Dowd: They're roughly the same. We've made one change over the past week or so that we're now actually screening for is, a fence in the backyard. It's the number one most requested thing that we get. It's like, hey. Everybody got a dog during COVID. I need a fence for the house. I don't wanna let, walk the dog outside in the Chicago and Wisconsin winters. So that's been the big change actually is we're now we prefer homes with fences or if it doesn't have a fence, we add on, like, $3 in our budget assuming that we're gonna have to put a fence on the house. Outside of that, acquisitions are largely similar. We're just getting better at them. Like, we collect a lot of data. I've got the serial number of every fridge. I've got serial number of every water heater across all of it. Like, we we need to collect that data to get smart about our forecasting and our budgeting. So we're getting better at the acquisition process, but it is it is more of the same. Trent Werner: Very nice. And Sean, where can people hear more from you or connect with you? Sean O'Dowd: So we our our website is www.scholasticcapital.com And then I I'm pretty active on Twitter. I share like a kind of a a running daily monologue of, like, what what we're thinking about, what we're doing, what we're seeing. So at Sean O'Dot 15. I'm the 15th Irish guy, I know Sean family. But I'm Sean O'Dot 15 on Twitter. Trent Werner: Very nice. We'll make sure those are all linked below. Sean, thank you so much for sharing about Scholastic Capital, your single family investment portfolio, and I don't think we've ever heard someone focus specifically on high end school districts as a fund model. So that was very cool to hear. Sean O'Dowd: Well, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Intro speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real Estate Professionals Investing podcast on Wynn, your community of investing knowledge for growth. We hope that this episode has increased your knowledge and added value to your path to freedom. If you would, please take a second to rate us so that we can get more great investors to interview. If you or someone that you know wants to be on, please visit westsideinvestors.com and fill out our form to be on the show. Thank you again, and enjoy your day.
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