Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at a real estate conference about how we’ve grown our multifamily syndication business to over 1,700 units in two years. The night before the conference started there was a reception for speakers and out of town guests. As I walked into the room with a colleague, another operator walked up to my friend and said “you stole my investor!”
It was literally the first thing out of their mouth, and while phrased as a joke and immediately followed by a hug between two old friends, it stuck with me and prompted this article. You see, that phrase is the absolute opposite philosophy that we run our business by, and has been a consistent theme that has bothered me for a while. We operate our business with an Abundance Mindset. Rather than fighting over investors, or trying to cut the knees out of a competitor we believe there is much to be gained by running a business with an outlook of endless opportunity and bountiful resources. We really try to live our lives by this mantra, but certainly apply it to Wildhorn Capital’s dealings.
Ok that’s easy to say but how do we actual practice this? Let’s start by defining some ways we incorporate the Abundance Mindset in our daily business.
The Abundance Mindset Put Into Practice
- We constantly refer investors to our friends and other operators in the multifamily space. We don’t believe an investor “belongs” to anyone, and the smartest investors are diversifying their real estate dollars the same way they diversify their stock portfolio. As we get to know an investor and their goals, we routinely will make an introduction to another group in the hopes the investor can find good opportunities in various parts of the country on different timelines than our deals.
- We share information with other operators—including our thinking on new deals. We work hard to maintain relationships with other operators doing deals in our markets, and will regularly reach out as we start underwriting a new deal. We often say one of our favorite things about this business is that it’s more cooperative than it is competitive. We truly believe that. We share details of our operations—including occupancy, financials performance, etc—and our thinking on the underwriting of new deals. This helps us stay on top of market trends related to Cap Rates, etc. In fact, we’re part of two separate mastermind meetings with other operators where we share business sensitive information about performance and underwriting. It’s also led to partnerships on deals, and more success for Wildhorn Capital..
- We introduce competitors to brokers in our area. There are enough deals to go around and try as we might, we just can’t buy them all. We also want others to be successful and happy–so if we meet someone looking to get started in the business or break into Texas, we will happily introduce them to our favorite brokers so they can start to build relationships of their own.
- We believe in the Abundance Mindset so much, that we’ve created a new educational mastermind program called The Syndicator Incubator. It is designed to teach our practices to other investors looking to break into the syndication business and share our operational contacts. We go open kimono here, holding nothing back. The more people we can help achieve success and fulfill their dreams, the better. While some people might look at this as creating competition for ourselves, we believe in the greater good and relationships we’ll create as a winning formula for everyone.
The Abundance Mindset Delivering Results
And what do the results look like from this mindset of abundance? Well a few of the things we directly correlate include
- Immediate success is enabled as a result of building more and more allies across our industry. The commercial multifamily investing world is small and your name goes a very long way. As we have assisted as many operators as we come across, we build up a bank of folks respecting and supporting the Wildhorn brand. This leads to deal referrals, investor introductions and even great friendships and business partnerships.
- Long term thinking is required in an abundance mindset and this lines up with what our goals are at Wildhorn. We have always operated the business with a long term horizon as it is the absolute best way to think about the investments we tend to make and also enables a life by design for our team. We operate thinking about relationships that will drive our business over the next 10 and 20 years, not the next one or two deals.
- To be honest, it gives us better peace of mind. We’re partnership oriented, not competition oriented. Please don’t get us wrong, at our core we are fiercely competitive and truly despise losing. We want to win everything we do and understand there is certainly competition in this business. However, we do not think these things are mutually exclusive. Being able to look at other local operators who bid on our same deals without any sort of ill will or anxiety is a huge blessing.
We firmly believe that that having an Abundance Mindset is one of the biggest reasons we’ve been able to grow Wildhorn as fast as we have. When you can operate your business from a place free of fear, and if you have the support of your industry, you’ll just find that things just seem to work out easier than you’d otherwise imagine! The partnerships, relationships and even friendships that have been created will pay us back ten times over across the next 20+ years we plan to be doing this. Do you operate your life and business with an Abundance Mindset? If so, we’d love to connect.
Andrew Campbell is a native Austinite and Managing Partner at Wildhorn. He is a real estate entrepreneur who first broke into the business in 2008 as a passive investor. In 2010 he transitioned into active investing and management of a personal portfolio that grew to 76 units across Austin and San Antonio. He earned his stripes building and managing his personal portfolio before founding Wildhorn Capital and focusing on larger multifamily buildings. At Wildhorn, he is focused on Acquisitions and maintaining Investor Relations, utilizing his marketing and communications background to build long-term relationships.
