Robby Clark
Sarah: I'm going to be bringing in Robby Clark. Robbie is a serial entrepreneur RWC Management, property management business. He is also the founder of E-Fresh. If you guys know about that meal delivery service E-Fresh Meals. Reno GC company responsible for managing 30 plus sites with 50 to a hundred plus contractors at any time. Robby's been able to scale to 300 deals and has recently also bought a golf course. Robbie, welcome.
Robby: Thank you for having me.
Sarah: If you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit of an overview on how you've been able to develop so many successful companies and also scale to 300 plus businesses and buy that golf course. If you wouldn't mind also touching base on what happened in 2020 for you and then what your plans are in 2021?
Robby: Absolutely. I'll get into it from the beginning, like I've been investing in real estate for about eight plus years and I've probably made every single mistake you possibly can, which is why I've been able to figure out as much as I have over eight years. And there's a few easy things I can say to summarize it. It takes a lifetime of work to become an overnight success. That in any industry and I'm still building towards that. It doesn't come with that much help. And over time, what I've really gotten good at is really trying to build good teams.
And real estate in general. I like to say, there's nothing passive about building passive income. You gotta go for it and really make sure you're putting the right teams together. We've had a ton of help. We, it comes from all sides, whether it's the contractors, whether it's your managers, whether it's your property managers, whether it's your lenders and your brokers in your and your lawyers.
I put emphasis on that because you can have great JVs, but often lenders are even more important than we've had a lot of support from all angles. And over the course of eight years, I've been able to figure out a few things that work for us in terms of the management and being able to scale and really how to operate a business.
The fundamentals in that are the same in real estate, as I would be for something else. And I have other businesses as well, too. I have a meal prep company, E-Fresh Meals, in a landscaping company. All of my attention is focused on here and we have some other things going on, but this is the one that I've wanted to grow into a large business. I'm just always from the get go and I've been motivated. If we get into 2020, we've had the same struggle as anybody else would. If you're taking on a lot of projects with small projects, you're going to hit your thresholds. You're going to have cash flow issues at times, you're going to have tenant issues.
If you're managing. I'd like to take Claire Draige in the Windrose Group and has been unbelievably supportive to us in and one of my partnerships in particular in growing substantially and not just on the lending side, but her entire team, especially Claire is extremely knowledgeable. And we've had a lot of a lot of great people around us and it's taken time to build that kind of team. And that's what I would say, has been in the gist of why we're able to do what we do. It's time in there, it's making mistakes and learning from them and then persevering through that.
Sarah: Awesome. Thanks for sharing. Can you give us an idea of how quickly it took you to get to that 300? Like where were five years ago versus today as an example?
Robby: Five years ago it probably had, when I was doing this more so myself without JV partnerships, I was trying to float my own staff. I would need to sell. We completed a few properties. I'd sell one or two to pay, and then we go back at it. I would hit a peak of around 20 properties at the time, but that more had to do with how I was operating the business more than anything. I always had the division of having property managers and things like that, and getting to a hundred plus properties.
I just continued to pivot and pivot. Until I found the solution that seemed to work, right? Overall it took eight years, success goes from here to here, it's not here that doesn't happen. You have the occasional lottery winner and occasional entertainer who makes it big, the occasional athlete who didn't start training until 16, those things happen.
But overall, it's typically hard work and you gotta be experienced in the industry to have any sort of success. If you don't lose money on your first time you might lose it on your second one. And that's where you're going to learn. That's where you're going to learn what you're doing correctly and what you're not.
Sarah: Very cool. And just out of curiosity, because obviously, this is a seller's market right now. There's not a whole lot of stuff out there you guys are still acquiring. Can you give us tips or insights of how you are going about purchasing property nowadays in this market?
Robby: Yeah, absolutely. I think there's two different ways to approach it. This is why I say it's not a passive business for us. You can be super active. If you're a passive investor, I recommend it very differently than what I'm doing because we're looking full-time for deals and we're focusing on the cost per square foot of properties. We need to get a good cap rate as well to please our lenders and make sure we're doing the right thing. Like you see, the entire Ontario market is hot right now. I can't give specific areas for new investors. I think there's still a lot of great opportunities outside of the GTA to cash flow properly.
I generally recommend that newer investors start with something simple because it means they're going to be able to move on to the next job very quickly. I've had friends who start a little bit too big. That's why I've been obsessed with small homes. I know them so well, I can manage them. I know everything that's going to happen. So, I think starting off easy for new investors is good. And ensuring your numbers and that you're gonna cash flow for us personally, we're seeking areas across Ontario that have a low cost per square foot and a relatively low renovation budget from there.
I'll go off here a little bit. I hate to say the BRRRR model, because again even with the BRRRR model, we are doing this, but BRRRR happens when you get everything correct. And sometimes when you condition people, hey, the BRRRR is always going to work. They have 10, 15,000 in the home and they get upset about it when it's still you're like, guys you created 75, 80,000 in equity. It's a volume thing. If everything goes right yet, you're going to have a birth for sure. In. If you're going in an upward market, then obviously it's going to do well for you, but we tend to focus on cash flow.
The third thing for us is capital appreciation. Of course you're able to renovate. You want to be able to try and increase the value, but so passively again, I would look for an easy project. There's a lot in the Niagara region as well. And, Brantford, there's still a bunch of good areas here for passive income. And then if you want to do some larger projects, we can go for it. You can go anywhere in Ontario right now, and it's going to be a hot market.
Sarah: Final question, what big plans do you have for this coming year? Are you stopping? Are you continuing? Are you accelerating?
Robby: We're definitely accelerating. We did in 2020 we wanted to finish the projects we had on our plate and stabilize our assets. Again, we run this as a business. If you're serious, it's a little different approach than people trying to pick up a few properties with us again. We're aggressive with our targets and now it's working even closer with better teams and even closer with our lenders to ensure that we have tighter timelines fixed.
Any of the mistakes or things that we know that we could do better, just improve this year on that. We can continue to turn over properties at a faster rate and then focus on high cap rate areas. We definitely have pretty aggressive targets and are looking to hopefully acquire upwards of a thousand plus units this year.
Sarah: Awesome.
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