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Trent Werner: action. 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. On today's deal deep dive episode, we're joined by Chris Lento of EM Capital.
Chris is the founder and managing partner of EM Capital. We're gonna hear about his aerospace engineering background and his work in different defense contracts and all the cool stuff that comes with aerospace engineering. And we're gonna hear about his personal portfolio, how he translated that into his own company, syndication company, EM Capital. And then we're gonna cover a 67 unit deal in Kentucky that has plenty of hair on it and 5 property managers in 5 years. And we're gonna hear how Chris handled that and when he knew it was time to make the change of property managers.
Now let's welcome Chris Lento. All right. Chris Lento joining the Westside Investors Network podcast today. Chris, thanks for taking the time to chat with us.
Chris Lento: Yeah, I'm happy to be here, Trent. Thanks.
Trent Werner: Well, today, Chris and I are gonna chat about his career and then a deal in Kentucky, which we'll get into in a little bit. Chris, you have a a journey that a lot of people have where you have, you know, you had a previous life, a previous career before real estate, albeit kind of tied into real estate. What was your career before, you know, investing in a bunch of different real estate deals?
Chris Lento: Yeah. So prior to starting my own business, EM Capital, I was a aerospace engineer for 17 years, working on primarily defense contracts. So mainly, actually guidance and navigation systems for submarine launched nuclear missiles was really the primary thing I worked on for years. Yeah. Very different than real estate.
However, right out of college, I quickly got interested kind of in the real estate market. Boston. Boston real estate has always been really hot, so everyone's sort of aware of it. And, you know, I very quickly started looking at like, oh, you know, what is this who owns this property I'm renting right now? And how how did that work?
And how did he buy it? So within 2 years after graduating, I I bought a a 3 unit in the Boston area and sort of grew my portfolio on the side with really no intention of ever going full time. It was just sort of a side, like, a side activity.
Trent Werner: Well and a lot of people find themselves doing that. Right? You wanna expose yourself, invest in real estate, and then all of a sudden you kinda become hooked and end up wanting to do it full time. But Right. Not everyone is an aerospace engineer, going into real estate.
A lot of people are civil engineers or or have other jobs. I feel like aerospace engineering is probably pretty cool. Am I wrong?
Chris Lento: I mean, yeah, there's ups and downs. It's like any, you know, kind of engineering job. There's certainly I got to do a lot of cool kind of defense oriented stuff. I got to work with F15 Fighter Pilots on testing out some of our systems and I got to go into a submarine once. So there's cool stuff like that.
But then there's a lot of bureaucracy. The programs are big. They're very slow. They don't change very fast. And we had, you know, 10 years ago, we had plans that went out to 20 80 because that's, like, the whole life of certain submarines.
So they had to have yeah. I mean, it was just, like, 20 80? Come on. I can't you know? It was just it it was just ridiculous.
So so there's pluses and minuses. Like, the size of the programs just make it so you it's hard to make an impact, I guess.
Trent Werner: And and at what point did you decide to go full time in real estate and start EM Capital?
Chris Lento: So I moved to DC in 2012 to be sort of a customer liaison with the Navy. So I still worked for my company, but I was like a technical resource within the government. And I got to see the procurement side of it, which was really interesting to sort of see, you know, what our customer, the Navy, is looking for out of our contracts and what levers they have to pull and who they answer to. And it gave me a good perspective of, like, the whole kind of defense industry. And after coming back from that, I really couldn't see a position I wanted to be at in, say, 5 or 10 years.
Nothing, you know, I just had my daughter and everything involved kind of West Coast travel and a lot of, you know, as you climb the ladder, it's just a lot of in person meetings with the major defense contractors and a lot of them are very, not political, but they're not very productive. And it just was not a career trajectory that I was excited about anymore. And at that point, I really said, alright, what's my plan to transition? And I'd already been ramping up my portfolio at that point. So I said, alright.
You know, in 2 years, I wanna be in a position where I can leave this job and and go full time.
Trent Werner: And how many units I think
Chris Lento: I guess short answer is, like, I got to a point in my career where I wasn't excited anymore about the next steps.
Trent Werner: Which is a natural progression for a lot of people. How many units did you have in your portfolio when you decided to, you know, make that leap?
Chris Lento: I had 30 units. Okay. 24 of them in Florida at, like, you know, kind of lower cost units, like a 100 k unit. But the other 6 actually, the other 12 in the Boston area. So those were more expensive units.
They were like in the 400 k unit.
Trent Werner: Okay. But I mean, you weren't just holding on to that 3 the triplex and, you know, making the leap with not a whole lot of experience. You had plenty of experience buying real estate before starting EM Capital and, you know, managing it, operating and all that all that jazz. Yes. Okay.
And what made you wanna get into the multifamily space as opposed to different asset classes, commercial, storage units, whatever you wanna whatever the other asset classes are?
Chris Lento: Yeah. No. Good question. I think a couple of reasons. 1, just familiar familiarity.
Like everybody has rented likely in their life. You know? You you graduate college or you graduate high school, you can get a place to live, you rent. So one, it's a familiar asset class. It's easy to understand.
It's kind of easy to see the demand. You know, there's population growth. You're gonna need more housing. And everyone needs it. So I I think for 1, just as a start, familiarity.
And then, you know, as I've been in it for a while, I've looked at other asset classes and I'm interested in, you know, some flex space industrial and some retail. But multifamily specifically in the housing constrained environment right now is just a solid bet. You know, we're gonna we need more housing. We're not building enough housing. No one's solving that problem anytime soon.
So that's, you know, that's where I think the focus is for us, at least for the next 5 years.
Trent Werner: Right. And how did your aerospace engineer background, what skills or what, I guess, teachings that you learned doing that have transferred into EM Capital and your real estate business?
Chris Lento: I would say project management, subcontractor management, just general organization skills. I mean, not a lot of specific, you know, engineering knowledge base, but and I've always been very kind of mechanically inclined as well. On my early units, I did a lot of the construction on them, or I managed directly a lot of the construction. And some of them were pretty heavy construction projects. So just knowing, you know, the details of the properties and and I think yeah.
And then general project management, you know, scheduled scheduled budget. You know, I was a product program manager for pretty large large programs for a decade.
Trent Werner: Right. And I know you've mentioned, so your personal portfolio was in Florida and Boston. Looking at EM Capital's Holdings, they're kinda sprinkled all over the the eastern side of the United States. How do you guys pick markets to invest in or target?
Chris Lento: Yeah. So pretty early on, I got I was introduced to the concept that, you know, not every market is the same. Right? I mean, Boston's a decent market. It's a low cash flow market, kind of high spec market with low cap rates and that was the world for a while.
And then I was introduced to the idea that, okay, there's other markets that maybe have less appreciation potential but higher cash flow. And then there's like these Goldilocks markets that have decent cash flow and will have good appreciation. And I really like that idea. Just trying to find those markets. So to test it out, I 1031 exchanged a property I had in Boston to a city about an hour away, Salem, Massachusetts, which had kind of higher cap rates, but a lot of appreciation potential.
And when, you know, 3rd party property management and tried to treat it like it was out of state. So I was like, alright. I'm gonna go to this property once a quarter. When there's an emergency, I'm not gonna deal with it. I'm gonna call the PM and, you know, go through the the steps.
And that was a good learning experience for me. And it kinda tested my model out. So then I took that property in 1031 exchange to Florida, to Tallahassee and then it really sort of no. I did only go down there probably once or twice a year. So after that, I was I was convinced, okay.
I can remotely manage these properties and I can target markets. So to answer your question, then I try to figure out, well, what markets do I want to target and what are the criteria? So what are generally a major market? So 200,000 people plus in population just because, that generally ensures a pretty good economic base. It's not just like one factory or one major employer.
And then beyond that, I wanted pretty consistent population growth for the past 3 to 5 years with a solid indication that it's gonna continue, which generally means that jobs are moving there. And the southeast is just at least for the East Coast. The other thing I wanna stay east of the Mississippi because because I want to be able to get to and back from my properties in a day if I have to. And there's enough population on the East Coast that I didn't need to look at Phoenix or Texas. Good markets, just harder to get to.
And there's plenty of opportunities, on this coast.
Trent Werner: So you've you've talked about the, I guess, the the job data and everything that you talk that you target or look for. Are there any financial metrics that you're looking for in terms of cap rate, cash on cash return, any of those?
Chris Lento: Yeah. So, you know, once we have the major markets, we start and then we try to concentrate. Right? Like, I'm not looking at every market that meets that criteria. I try to pick 3 or 4 to to get to know better because you can just underwrite them faster.
You're like, oh, the northeast of that market's bad. A lot of crime. Just not even worth it. Don't spend the hour digging into it. So then, you know, once a property meets the location criteria, it's in a neighborhood with an area median income that meets our threshold for that city that can support the rents we want.
We look for 1985, build or or newer, you know, based on recent experience and just ease of management. And then once you start underwriting, we generally try to underwrite to what we think our investors appetites are. So for example, typically we try to get to a price where we can give our investors a 7% preferred return with a, say, 13 to 20% annualized rate of return depending on the market. So when the market's hot, you know, maybe it's it's higher. And when the market's tight, maybe it's in the lower end.
And we're constantly kind of talking to our investors. Like, hey, here's what the market's doing. You know, the returns are a little bit lower right now due to interest rates. Are you still interested? And, you know, based on that, we update our our underwriting criteria.
So it's really yeah. The cap rate matters. And but at the end of the day, it's what do we think our business plan can can produce from an investor return perspective?
Trent Werner: Okay. And then do you have a certain number of units that you are targeting?
Chris Lento: Yes. But I generally try to look at it from an acquisition price. Because different markets will have different, you know, cost per units.
Trent Werner: Yep.
Chris Lento: But we want to look for units that are for properties that are 12,000,000 to 35,000,000 in acquisition price. So, you know, really expensive market that might be 50 units. But another market that might be, you know, 200. So, but in general, we wanna be over the number of units that's can support a full time on-site property manager, which is, I would say, 80. It's kind of the minimum for that.
Trent Werner: I'm glad I'm glad you brought that up. Last conversation I had, we were talking about the same exact thing, and I asked him what his on-site number is, and he said 75 to a 100 is is kind of the the ballpark. So Right. You confirmed that with us.
Chris Lento: I have a 60 unit that we have an on-site leasing agent and a part time handyman.
Intro speaker: Okay.
Chris Lento: It just makes it more complicated.
Trent Werner: Yeah. So my my follow-up question to the, you know, you analyzing and and and finding different markets to invest in. Once you find a good market, are you gonna continue looking there, or are you always trying to broaden your your net and look at new markets constantly?
Chris Lento: Try to look at new markets every 6 months. So try to, like, you know, set aside a day to say, alright. Do the markets we're in still work for us? Do we want to expand to another market? There's huge advantages to just knowing a market and having a reliable property manager in that market, reliable subcontractors, landscapers you can go to and you know that they're going to get reasonable prices.
And they know that you have multiple properties in the area, so they're going to kind of give you volume prices rather than one off prices. So there are a lot of benefits to having the economies of scale. But at the same time, if a market has peaked or, you know, is is showing signs that it's not it's no longer what you what I was looking for in the 1st place, you wanna be able to to pivot. So about every 6 months, we sort of sit down with a team and say, alright. Let's look at the markets we have.
Any new markets come up. There's a Milken report every year called the best cities report. I always read that. Interesting to kinda see what they think the emerging markets are. There's a number of different, you know, reports coming out.
Best cities reports, IRR insights is a is a good annual report that I like to read. So, yes, we're constantly evaluating, but at the same time, I wanna keep a a small enough group that we can understand the markets. I've met people that look like all over the US, and I just don't know how you can do that without a huge team.
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And the reason I ask that is because I mean, personal experience and other conversations I've had tells me that getting to new markets can be different in terms of building relationships with property managers, contractors, brokers. You know, if you're only looking at on market deals, you know, you might not you might not get the best deals. So how do you and EM Capital go about building those relationships when you are expanding to a new market?
Chris Lento: Yeah. Good question. So first we try to leverage the relationships we have in other markets. So a lot of times, you know, these brokers are regional. So you might say, hey.
I'm starting to look in, I don't know, Spartanburg, South Carolina. Do you guys have an officer? Is there anyone in your office that that does covers that area? So that'd be 1. A lot of times, property managers are regional or might have different different, offices around the region or might or might know other property managers that they are friendly with and, you know, know do a good job.
And then they can tell you who's active brokers in the area. Mhmm. Insurance companies. So basically, use the network I have of lawyers, insurance companies, brokers, property managers to get recommendations in the new markets. And then start looking, you know, sign up for a bunch of broker websites and things like that to get their deals.
And then see who's transacting. So who who are the most active players in the market? Yeah. And then just I like to target 5 and just start reaching out to them, kinda introduce myself, leveraging my prior track record, and establishing relationship and letting them know, you know, we'll underwrite deals quickly. We'll give you feedback on why we don't like the deals, which is, you know, the majority of them.
Right? Like, you get a 100 deals, you you know, maybe 90 of them look interesting. I mean, maybe 10 of them look interesting. And and then start developing that relationship and and giving them, you know, a clear buy box. You know, you know, this is what we're looking for.
This is not what we're looking for. So that's sort of the process and then build from there.
Trent Werner: I really I really like that strategy because you do focus east of the Mississippi. You are able to leverage those regional relationships versus someone that is looking at every single market across the country. At that. I mean, that's a great idea and a great strategy that you just shared.
Chris Lento: Thanks.
Trent Werner: So now let's let's move to EM Capital. So you said you started in 2012, 2014?
Chris Lento: 2017.
Trent Werner: 17. Okay. Where is EM Capital now in terms of assets under management, number of assets held, units? Do you have any fun facts you can share about it?
Chris Lento: Sure. We have 600 units under management across 8 assets, and they're just over a 100,000,000 in value. So that's where we are now. We did 60,000,000 in acquisitions in 2022, which was by far the biggest year. 2023 was completely dead.
I think we did maybe like 5,000,000, did some smaller deals. And then 24, we're selling out an asset right now and we're under contract for our largest deal to date. So hopefully we'll close out this year, if not early next year.
Trent Werner: Very nice. And speaking of some of the EM Capital assets, today, we're gonna talk about a 67 unit deal in Kentucky. What can you tell us about this 67 unit deal in Kentucky?
Chris Lento: Sure. So this is, the first deal I syndicated. It's a 67 unit class c deal in a tertiary market, south of Louisville. So I would say this is a big lesson learner. I came in.
You know, I'd recently gone out my own, was itching to get a deal done, had built up an investor network that knew what I was doing and was, you know, interested. And I was joined, through a real estate investing group that I was involved with with with 2 women who had a deal under contract and were having trouble raising. So quickly evaluated it, seemed like a great basis. You know, I was a little iffy in the market. I didn't it did not fit that criteria.
It's not a 200,000 person market with, you know, great indicators of job growth and population growth, but It wasn't a bad market, but it was certainly tertiary. You know, we met. I liked them. Thought we could work together, and we bought it. So that was 5 years ago.
Almost 5 years ago this summer. And it's been a roller coaster. So I guess the one problem has been consistently 67 units in a tertiary market is very hard to manage. Well, so in a lot of these tertiary markets, you have the apartment buildings are are locally owned and locally managed. There's not a lot of quality third party property management just because the population is not there or the the number of buildings are not there to support them.
So you have a lot of condo managers and you have a lot of people that can manage, like, 20 unit buildings sort of with an off-site model where there's no one kinda sitting in on the property. And then at 67 units, it's right on the edge of being able and it's a lower rent unit. Like, when we first bought it, 2 bedrooms were 625. So it's inexpensive. Yeah.
You know, and we I think we got it for 28 k a door. So we had a very low basis. Yeah. But it's just not a lot of absolute dollars to pay, you know, a full time handyman, a full time leasing agent. So we went through 5 property managers in 5 years.
And it's yeah. It was a journey from kind of bigger property managers that had minimum monthly payments that were just killing us to we hired, just w two employees. We start you know, we hired a full time property manager and a full time handyman that effectively worked for me. And then I hired, kind of a back office person from one of my other properties to work at night and sort of make sure those 2 were enter entering work orders correctly and reconciling the books and doing all the stuff that the back office of a property management company does and I don't know how to do nor do I really want to know how to do it. So basically, I cobbled together a little property management company quickly to run it for a year and a half.
That was the best it performed. But then, you know, he got another the handyman got another job. She got divorced and moved. And then we, you know, we couldn't find anyone else. Went to another local property management company.
They did a terrible job. So it's it's been just a challenge. We have a great property management company now, but it really took a long time to get there. And now we're finally selling. We're closing, next Thursday, hopefully.
Knock on wood.
Trent Werner: Congrats.
Chris Lento: Yeah. And it's but it's been a journey. I mean, I've I've certainly learned a lot. I don't have a huge stake in it from a GP perspective due to my role coming in, but I've put a lot of effort into it, And I'm looking forward to closing the book on it.
Trent Werner: It turned the page on this one.
Chris Lento: Right. And the returns are gonna be good for the investors. So that's, you know, that's huge. And that's been my focus for this property entire time. Like, I got my early investors into it.
I had to make sure it worked.
Trent Werner: Well yeah. And and no wonder you spend so much time on it because the first one is always one that you kinda hold a little bit more near and dear to your heart, especially for the investors.
Chris Lento: Right. Exactly.
Trent Werner: So, I mean, I think a lot of people have heard that bad property management companies can tank a deal pretty quickly if you don't do anything about it. It sounds like you did plenty to to handle those those obstacles that were presented to you, churning and burning through different third party management companies. You said you went through 5 management companies in 5 years. At what point do you, especially for this property that we're talking about, make that call to say, hey, you're done. We gotta go find someone else.
What were the signs that jumped out at you that made you make those decisions?
Chris Lento: I mean, usually, it starts showing up in the obvious metrics like occupancy, collections, things like that. You know, it's clear that they're not paying attention or they're not, you know, fully focused on the property. We have weekly meetings weekly Zoom meetings with all our property managers. Them not being prepared for those meetings, not really being able to answer questions. We always get property manager access to the back end of the whatever system we're using so that I can just dig.
So I'll spend, you know, half an hour a week per property just sort of digging in, clicking into an invoice. You know, what is this $1200 plumbing invoice? Like, oh, it's it's cleaning, like, the kitchen sink? That's weird. Why is it $1200?
You know, just just sort of, like, digging in. And then on the meeting, not to be kind of a gotcha, but if if they're not, they don't seem like they're on the ball, I'll just ask them thing things like that to see kinda what their answers are. And, you know, what I'm really doing is confirming what you already know. Because I have a feeling, What I've learned is that, you know, once you have that feeling like something's not right here, something's probably not right. Yeah.
And you just can kinda tell by the way the property is going, things that aren't being handled. We have my assistant calls every property, once a quarter and acts like a,
Trent Werner: like a
Chris Lento: prospective resident. Yeah. Exactly. And then gives us a report. And, you know, we we have different softwares we're adding to our bigger properties where we can listen to the phone calls that that they do with the residents.
Yeah. We have a whole list of them on the on the website. You you just kinda click through. Oh, this is a 3 minute call. What what do they say?
How are they how are they presenting? And let's start looking at things like that. But, yeah, I mean, kinda gut feel based on a lot of lot of different metrics. And then, you know, sooner the better. Like, the minute you start feeling that, if it's a bigger company, go right to the regional management or the regional VP and say, hey.
What's going on? I think we have a problem. And, you know, I've had a lot of properties where we've changed our on-site. So, you know, we kept the same company, just switched on-site managers. And every time I've gone to their upper management and just said, hey.
You know, there's something going on. I'm not getting the response I expect expected or there seems to be some issues. They're already aware of it. Yeah. There is.
We've been we've been trying to work in the background before we told you, but we think that they're not a a good fit. And we're gonna you know, we've been looking. Yeah. Which I don't love. I'd rather be transparent upfront.
Ad speaker: You know, if they had an if they had an indication
Chris Lento: of that a month ago, I would have liked to known that. But
Trent Werner: Yeah. I I really I mean, I've never heard anyone else say from on a ownership standpoint of getting the PM access to whatever software those companies are using. But I mean, we have in house management, so I basically have that too. And it's so nice being able to just go sift through, dive into things without having to wait for them to give it to you.
Chris Lento: So that's
Trent Werner: a really good idea that I think a lot of people should maybe borrow.
Chris Lento: Yeah. And I've we've never had a no. Sometimes we kinda like go back and forth with what permissions they give us. Yeah. You know, like one AppFolio PM company, I can see the invoices and I can see, say, like, the resident applications and another one I can't.
Trent Werner: Yeah.
Chris Lento: And but, typically, we can work through it.
Trent Werner: Yeah. No. That's that's a that's a really good idea. So, Chris, going into this deal, I know you said you were kinda connected to some other GP partners on on this deal. What was the, I guess, business plan for the 60, 70 units here in Kentucky that we're talking about?
Was it value add? Was it, you know, just a buy and hold? What was the business plan going into this?
Chris Lento: So going in, it was really a deferred maintenance, improved management, and stabilization plan. So the property had been owned by an older couple for 15 years. The husband had died. The wife was really just barely kind of holding on. So it had become kind of a people weren't paying rent and there's a lot of kind of weird stuff going on.
So go in, kind of clean it up. We had a CapEx budget to to do about 5,000 per unit, which is not much now. But in 20 2019 when we bought it, that that wasn't a full rental, but that was, like, you know, clean it up and do a decent turn was the plan. But certainly not like new cabinets, countertops, anything like that. We also had some, we had a green loan on it.
So there's a number of green initiatives that we had to do that needed to be sort of cleaned up after we got a hold of it. We somehow had green money to create energy efficient or buy energy efficient hot water heaters, but the property was all electric hot water heaters, so they don't exist. So just some things like that where we had to sort of move the funds around and and iron it out. But it effectively ended up being a stabilization. So, you know, making the units nice, being professional, increasing the market rent, and just running it more as a business and less sort of as a as a hobby, I guess.
Trent Werner: Right. Okay. And then so 67 units, you said 5,000 a door. So kind of a light face lift from what it sounds like per unit. What is your target occupancy, and were you planning on spending $5,000 per unit and and updating every single unit, or did you have a percentage of the units that you wanted to touch before turning it to the next buyer?
Chris Lento: Yeah. So, I mean, the target occupancy was was 95 plus. It's a market that that doesn't have a lot of housing and certainly not a lot of renovated housing. So we quickly found out that if we just painted things and cleaned them up and, you know, put new carpets in, people were banging down the doors at at market rates or even a little above. So so that was good.
Now how qualified they were, even if they were qualified, whether they were gonna continue paying after month 7 when their car broke down. That was probably worse than we expected, but the demand was certainly higher than we expected. And then, no, we didn't plan to do every unit. It was a little bit more, you know, as units became available, we'd assess them. Some of the classics were kind of acceptable, and we would just re rent them as it is, paint the walls, you know, light turn.
And then some of the units had had kind of some some significant problems. And the property also had some foundation issues. It has probably, like, 4 foot crawl spaces under 3 of the buildings, and there was a lot of joist rot that we were aware of. So we got a good deal because we knew there was a pretty significant problem that that we had to address right away. And that was part of our kind of initial capex plan.
Trent Werner: And you said you acquired it at 28 k a door?
Chris Lento: Yeah. I think it was 28 k a door.
Trent Werner: And you're closing next week at?
Chris Lento: Closing next week at 61. Wow. Yeah.
Trent Werner: Woah. Okay.
Chris Lento: But there's a lot of capex put in there along the way and a lot of down months with those those property trans property manager transitions had some pretty big dips. Because if you have a a subpar property manager and they get wind that you're moving on, it gets worse certainly before it gets better. So then you find out all the problems from the prior property manager when the new one comes in. So, yeah, that sounds like a great sounds like a home run, but it's really it's like a solid double maybe.
Trent Werner: Yeah. You can't complain about an extra base hit.
Chris Lento: Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Trent Werner: Yeah. I so the the other question I have for you is you you got a taste of the in house management. Right? You put together your management team for a trial run. Do you have in house management now on any of your other assets?
Chris Lento: We don't. And that's, I think, one of the downsides of having a distributed portfolio now where you're located. Mhmm. And I've certainly, you know, modeled out and thought hard about, do I want to switch to an on-site model? You know, I'm definitely like an asset managed focused company.
Like, I like the project management. I would, you know, not be opposed to owning a property management company or self managing. But it's it's trying to figure out how to do that on a distributed basis. And whether it makes sense. Right?
I mean, your back office is your back office. But having those boots on the ground in all these locations, is it worth it? Do we have the economies of scale in any of those markets to really know the market? And that's where, you know, a good third party manager can really help. I mean, they know the competition.
They know the market. They know the vendors. So, not right now, but that's something we're definitely considering at some point.
Trent Werner: And I'd imagine it would probably make more sense, like you said, when you have the economies of scale in specific markets. You know, if you have a 100 doors in 1 market or, you know, 200 doors in a market where you can make it make sense across those different assets, that makes perfect sense. Well, Chris, we talked about the deal. We talked about EM Capital. We talked about you being an aerospace engineer.
Is there anything else you wanted to share about yourself, your business, or this deal today?
Chris Lento: Well, yeah. But I guess one thing that I've found really exciting since COVID at least is that the pace of technology in the in the real estate market has has really increased.
Trent Werner: Mhmm.
Chris Lento: And coming from sort of a technology background, it's exciting to see all these different third party players coming in and, you know, optimizing marketing. And, you know, we'll see where AI kind of fits in for real in in this game. You know, it's kind of nibble around the edges here. So I think it's very exciting. And I think multifamily kind of the business model is changing pretty fast.
And I think that's gonna be very interesting to see where it goes. You know, the capital markets are changing. A lot more people are starting to invest in these kind of alternative assets. There's a lot of different vehicles to let people invest, in a more liquid basis. So, you know, a lot of changes, and I think it's generally for the better.
So I'm excited to see where things go.
Trent Werner: Absolutely. And, Chris, where could people connect with you or hear more from you?
Chris Lento: Yeah. The best way to connect with me is is via LinkedIn. So Chris Lento or EM Capital. And then, my website is emcapitalgroup.com. And we'll
Trent Werner: make sure all those are linked in the show notes. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing about your background and your 67 units with a little bit of ebbs and flows included in in that deal cycle. And congrats on closing on it here in the next week.
Chris Lento: Yeah. We'll see, hopefully, next Thursday.
Trent Werner: Fingers crossed. Thanks, Chris.
Chris Lento: Yep. Alright. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
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