Reach Your Real Estate Goals - Starting NOW! With Tamar Mar | Real Estate to Freedom Podcast #1

About Tamar

Tamar Mar is a full-time business, a real estate investor, and a superstar at raising money fast. In this episode, we will discuss her journey into real estate investing and her decision to jump from the corporate world into multifamily syndication, shifting her focus to the acquisition of underperforming commercial and multifamily. She will tell us her strategies and how she significantly improved the operating income of a property within months of taking it over. Tamar is based out of Seattle, Washington.

Contact her:

Investing for Life podcast

www.marotagroup.com

Transcripts (Automated)

Hi Tamar. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Agostino, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for joining. I appreciate it. Appreciate it very much. Well, maybe you can give us a brief introduction before we get going here.

Yeah, you bet. So I'm Tamar Mar and yes, that I'm not stuttering. That's totally my name. I married somebody with the last name Mar. I am Tamar Mar and I hope that made you laugh. A business and real estate investor. I have been investing in real estate for over 15 years and going back even farther than that. And I purchased my first house when I was 19, believe it or not. We fell into real estate investing because we had bought a house and, I got a promotion that took us across the country. So we decided to rent it out for four years while we were across the country working and going to Grad school. And a little bit later I decided that I really wanted to have my own business. I had been an operations executive for about five years for some startup companies. I have a startup background for 20 years and I just knew that at whatever I could do to help other people succeed in their businesses I could do in my own business and maybe even better.

And so I decided I was going to create a real estate company. Originally we started doing houses on auction site unseen and we would renovate those and turn them into rentals. And then about four years later I realized, you know, this is gonna take a really long time to reach our passive income goals because that's what we were doing it for, to build up an empire to live off of essentially. And so I started a syndication business surrounding multifamily about a year and a half ago. And I've been crushing it, purchasing apartment buildings with, uh, my investor partners ever since.

So that was super exciting because it was something like the month of March where I said, okay, by the end of this year I'm going to have my first deal and I'm going to start looking around September because I think we had needed to refinance one of our single-family houses and pull out some liquidity and whatnot. Well, I got my first property under contract two months later in May. Because I just started taking massive action. I found it on Loopnet, believe it or not. And I ran the numbers. I started underwriting and I thought, holy junk, this actually really works. And I heard that nothing works on Loopnet. So I called my broker friend, had him take a look at it and we both thought, oh my gosh, this is too good to be true. So it was actually my very first offer that I had ever put in on a multifamily property.

I won the bid and I think there was five offers total. And it was 15 units and the rents, it, it was kind of a mom and pop sort of a thing. It was owned by a family and the grandpa had a big, huge key ring and he was there all the time and he did all the maintenance and whatnot and uh, and so they had an affinity for all of their tenants and just didn't want to take advantage of them, so they had had rents way under market. We're talking almost $300 a door under market, so there was an opportunity for me to go in and not only have value-add from a rental increase perspective to bring it to market rents but also there's a lot of deferred maintenance. The units were very dated. It was a c class property in a c class neighborhood. So we didn't want to make it something, you know, extremely beautiful. But we definitely knew that there was an opportunity to do some cosmetic rehab and get some more rents out of it. So, uh, that's the first property that I landed. I can tell you as much about that as you want. It was super exciting.

I thought you stopped the project now, right?

I do, yeah. So on that particular one, this is the kind of stuff that I love hearing from other people as they go once you bought it. And so just to give you an idea, we thought that we would go in, raise the rents and at the worst case scenario we would have five tenants leave, right? Because they probably wouldn't be able to afford the new rent, but we're talking, we went from about 460 a door to maybe like 675 was the first bump that we did because we wanted to see who would stay if the units were not renovated. So we had five leave for sure, but that was five in the first month. And then the second month came and...