How to Find Real Estate Partners? What Tools & Systems to Implement for Scale?

Commercial Real Estate Investing From A-Z

How to form a successful partnership as real estate operators, what are some of the important tools and processes to make your company run smoothly? Amy Johnson, managing partner of Y Street Capital, shares her knowledge.

How did you partnership come about?

My husband and I decided to get into the rental game market of residential houses and we turned our own little primary house into a rental and moved into a gross, ugly, disgusting house and just kept doing that over and over. It was difficult for us to scale, to keep doing this individual residential house: get the loan, qualify, find the right property, all of those things and we knew we wanted to continue to grow. By that time, fast forward, we luckily acquired a great amount of properties, and we decided to sell some of our portfolio and roll those into some larger assets. And one of those assets, we were an LP or a limited partner in some self-storage. We brought the capital into a self-storage project, and we saw the power of that.

We continued to do other projects and then I saw I had a lot of individuals or spheres around me that kind of followed us in our residential home, acquiring. We were the first, and then others said, "Oh, I want to do that." And so, they did that. For the residential, there were some that we would take a house and we would partner with. We'd be 50-50, and other individuals would bring in capital for the project. We decided we were doing those JV partnerships, so why don't we just do the same thing on this larger scale? And we had some bad choices on a couple of things, we're like, "Okay, I'm not going to invest in that market, or we won't do that again." I remember thinking, still stuck a little bit in that residential Bootstrap or mindset that I needed to find the cheapest property so I bought a condemned building and we still made money. It was a lot of work to go from condemned to occupancy, but great how valuable those life lessons were that we got. And we are so grateful we didn't lose money on it, we made some as long as we account for all of our time for it.

What tools have you implemented? What has been the most helpful to your company and how do you manage and oversee everything?

One of the systems that we utilize is our EOS system, it's been our rocks and our wigs. It is aligned and doing our level 10. If you have a good EOS system, it's because you have your priorities straight. When you have a company that is only handling emergencies or firefighting, you're not putting your priorities in straight for it and that's where you're not growing as well. Another system for us is Asana but that's more for our project management standpoint. It wouldn't be beneficial for a plumbing business or one of those kind of businesses. I used to use my good old Google Doc and then make my to-do list, and then I'd share it with my assistant. Good tracker, but there's more accountability with Asana. There are things you can build out inside of it. Paul Han is our systems guy in our company, and he's remarkable for the zaps, automation, and everything else there. There's no way I could ever do that, and that's going back to making sure you have the right people in the right seats. I am not Paul, but he also would probably never want to trade me and talk to all the people that I talk to every day.

Amy Johnson

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-johnson-358217162/