0:00 We're gonna get to
the bottom of Irre francois.
0:01 I, I wanna hear your full hero's journey.
0:05 I wanna hear about how you all started out
and you know, but let's take it from the beginning.
0:09 Tell, tell us where you came from in business
and kind of what got you started in real estate.
0:13 I'll take it back, I'll take it back.
0:15 It's a story.
0:15 It's been a journey.
0:16 It's been a great journey like all other journeys,
man filled with hills and obstacles, but always finding a way to overcome and make it to the
other side on that.
0:23 I am so excited to see that the journey continues.
0:26 I'm still not finished.
0:27 So, but listen, you know, everyone's story
in the regards to how they got exposed to real estate, how they got into real estate
is very different.
0:34 Mine is different as well, very nontraditional.
0:36 I do not come from a family of real estate
investors or parents or grandparents that owned a bunch of real estate growing up.
0:42 The only real estate that my parents owned
was a house that we lived in in Maryland where I grew up, although I was born in New York
City, I think a far reach not within grasp of my parents to become real estate investors,
particularly being the immigrants that they were when they came to the States from Haiti
back in the mid sixties, when you are a child of immigrant parents, very religious.
1:01 And then on top of that, my father being ex-military
education is really, really just like beating over your head man and you have to go to the
best and try to do the best.
1:10 You are not going to be faced with a lot of
different career choices of what you like to do.
1:16 It's gonna be very, very narrowed, what it
is whether or not you like that career choice or not, Vinny.
1:21 That's the way it was back in the days.
1:22 It's like you are going to be this.
1:23 Luckily I was able to break out of that mode
of a little bit.
1:26 My freshman year in college, I said enough
is enough.
1:28 My father wanted me to go to medical school.
1:30 I was in pre-med my freshman year in college,
Boston College specifically go Eagles.
1:34 Then you and I are gonna talk about later.
1:35 OK.
1:36 Hockey team.
1:37 Ok.
1:38 Ok.
1:38 Now gloves are off.
1:39 So, you know, like I said, when I was premed,
freshman year, I took this one class called Biochemistry.
1:43 And I said, ok, enough is enough.
1:44 I just, I can't do this.
1:46 I don't want to do this.
1:47 I have no interest in doing this.
1:48 So from there it was as you know, in college
you maneuver around, you try to find what your interests are, what you like, what you
don't like could have an interest in pursuing a career and, and so on and so forth.
1:56 Right.
1:57 And all the, all the while trying to find
out who you are being a young Haitian American in the city of Boston in the mid eighties,
early nineties, kind of a thing.
2:04 It was business, it was business that I really
started grabbing.
2:07 It, made sense.
2:07 I liked it.
2:08 I liked making money, you know, and I figured,
you know what other major to go into his business.
2:12 Shortly after graduating from college.
2:14 A couple of years after that grad school,
Georgetown come out, get a job on Wall Street and again, no background, no family history
in any parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles that have ever worked on Wall Street before.
2:25 Truth be told, I had no idea what the heck
it was.
2:27 When I started grad school.
2:29 It wasn't until my second year.
2:30 We started having employers from Merrill Lynch,
from Citigroup, from Bank of America.
2:35 Come down, interview studentss, some buddies
that I did graduate from BC with.
2:38 I reached out to them because I knew one of
my buddies, his family was in the business in the Wall Street business.
2:43 So I reached out and I said, hey, Mark, you
gotta help me out here, man.
2:45 We have all these employers coming down, talking
about interviewing for jobs and investment banking departments and equity research departments
and sales and trading departments and so on and so forth.
2:54 What, what, what am I getting?
2:55 And so he broke it down, explained it to me.
2:57 I like the equity research opportunities,
which is basically you are in charge of covering a particular sector, particularly oil and
gas for food and beverage, for retail technology, obviously, and you have to become an expert
in that particular industry.
3:11 You're not gonna be covering the stocks that
fall within that industry, writing research reports and really telling portfolio managers
at mutual funds and hedge funds, who own these stocks?
3:21 What is your stock recommendation?
3:22 Do you recommend buying the stock selling
the stock?
3:25 What is the research?
3:25 What's the evidence that you have put behind
your stock recommendation?
3:30 They call it research analysts on Wall Street,
right?
3:32 Some call it stock research analysts, some
call it equity research analysts versus a credit research analyst that are people that
analyze the debts, believe it or not.
3:41 There are analysts out there that make decisions
on stocks based on what just the charts are doing regardless of what is happening with
earnings, regardless of what's happening with the bonds, simply on what's going on with
the direction of the chart.
3:52 So I was interested in fundamental equity
research, got into it covering technology stocks, working with the senior analysts learning
my trade, learning my craft before I broke out became my own senior analyst covering
my own group of stocks.
4:03 And this was back man during the mid nineties
and it was, it was the heyday, we were having a blast.
4:08 We were, you know, traveling around the globe,
not only meeting with the companies that you were covering, but also meeting with the clients
that you were pitching these stocks to because these people, pool managers around the world,
not only here in the United States, also throughout Europe, throughout Asia.
4:21 I had clients in Singapore, I had to travel
to Singapore to meet with portfolio managers and it was a heck of a run met some incredibly
smart people.
4:28 When I was an equity research analyst on the
street, there was really never a discussion about real estate real estate investing.
4:33 The only time you would hear about it is if
the analysts that covered the res he or she would get him up and they would start talking
about, hey, we recommend buying this, this multifamily reap or this office re kind of
clouded.
4:45 Kind of confusing.
4:46 I never really immersed myself into it, right?
4:48 I was covering technology side.
4:49 That was my just small small exposure to real
estate investing.
4:54 I never bought any property I never bought,
you know, I never flipped any never house hacked or anything else like that.
4:58 Fast forward.
4:59 It was an uncle of mine along with his wife,
they started in New York, they were buying some duplexes, they were buying some for plex.
5:06 I was really close to him, always talking
to him about how he got involved in real estate.
5:11 He used to be an auto mechanic, closed up
his shop into real estate investing and so on and so forth.
5:15 And I was like, wow, this is, this is really
interesting.
5:17 And I think for me, it became very interesting
because I saw him happy for the first time.
5:21 He was in charge.
5:22 He was in charge of his life.
5:23 He was in charge of his decisions rather than
taking borders from other folks before he had opened up his own auto shop and he was
loving, it was kind of hands off.
5:31 He was getting older, him and his wife were
thinking about where they're gonna be retiring.
5:33 His kids were out of the house.
5:34 I was like, hm, this is really beginning to
appeal to me and it was appealing to me at the same time that business on Wall Street
was beginning to slow down.
5:41 You know, they were all we were all being
asked to do more with less head count have been reduced.
5:45 Compensation have been reduced.
5:46 I started thinking about my transition.
5:48 Now I'm married with kids.
5:49 My kids are getting a little bit older, but
I'm still traveling like crazy, not spending as much time with them as I'd like to.
5:55 I didn't see that abating especially as things
are getting tougher and tougher on wall street, this boutique firm I was working at, it was
always business model, business strategy of the month.
6:03 They were shifting here and there not very
well capitalized.
6:06 I'm like, you know what?
6:07 This is not gonna end well and it didn't.
6:08 Right.
6:09 And so me and a bunch of folks, you know,
paid off.
6:11 So this was like in 2017, I tried to get back
onto the street and I was like, you know what, I don't think I'm gonna enjoy it as much as
I used to let me go ahead and start really looking into real estate.
6:21 And Vinny, I spent the summer of 2017, educating
myself.
6:25 I was going to local real meetings.
6:26 I was watching webinars.
6:27 I'm reading books.
6:28 That's the research analyst of me, right?
6:31 I like to point that out.
6:32 It seemed like from a very early age, right?
6:34 You get out of college, you're 24 25.
6:36 You know, because it sounds like you went
to master kudos to you for doing that right away.
6:39 And you're from a very young age, being looked
at for your advice on businesses and the way they're being run at some point, the business
of real estate kind of comes into your purview and now you're using all those skills to look
at that business and that business model as a potential for your future.
6:54 And it sounds like you got really intentional
with all those skills and applying them to something you want to learn more about.
7:01 And that's the great thing about real estate.
7:02 Take a look at your background and some of
the other partners and some of the other folks that character group, their backgrounds and
the skills that they've been able to transfer from where they used to work whatever W-2
job Fortune 500 corporate job that they used to have that they brought into real state.
7:14 I think about some of the skill sets that
I have garnered over the years working at Wall Street.
7:18 Usually when you're on in corporate, you pretty
much are getting skill sets in finance or in marketing or in management, you rarely
get all three.
7:27 Unless you deliberately deliberately find
your way into those different divisions.
7:32 Folks think Wall Street, they think finance
and we are, you know, valuations on spreadsheets, right?
7:37 We as we do performers on our deals, we do
performers on stocks and things like that.
7:41 People say what's gonna be the earnings for
this particular stock Tesla stock in the year 2025 2026.
7:46 Kind of this is kind of the same thing that
we do here when we underwrite our deals.
7:49 When we have think about a 7 to 10 year out,
those skills, underwriting and so on and so forth.
7:53 Financials, those are definitely transferable
into real estate.
7:56 I always say real estate is about the numbers,
the returns, the numbers need to work.
7:59 What a lot of people don't know is that there's
a lot of marketing, there's a lot of sales involved in Wall Street as well.
8:04 What does the marketing come into is like,
well, I could come up with a great call on Tesla or Amazon or Google or Facebook or whatever
it might be, but I still got to pitch it.
8:13 It's a crowded field.
8:14 I'm one of 25 sometimes 30 analysts covering
that Google Stock or Facebook or Tesla Stock?
8:19 How is my voice going to stand out amongst
the other analysts?
8:22 I gotta find a way to be differentiated, right?
8:24 That's marketing, that's not finance.
8:26 I can have $100 price target on a stock.
8:28 You can have $100 price target on the same
stock.
8:30 Why are they gonna listen to me versus you?
8:32 They're gonna pay either me for my idea or
they're gonna pay you for your idea, right?
8:36 I want them obviously to pay me.
8:37 Did you get right into the large stuff right
away?
8:40 I know how you got connected with the group,
but I'd love you to tell us more about that.
8:43 But how did you get to?
8:44 What was the first step you took when you
said, you know, I'm a high earing corporate person, but I get more into real estate.
8:49 It was a lot of just educating myself getting
exposed.
8:52 I said, OK, it seems like this is an industry
unlike in finance, unlike in, in Wall Street where folks come from, all walks of life.
8:59 Right.
8:59 You know, that we've met folks that are in
the construction industry, folks that are in I T, military veterans, you know, folks
that are lawyers, medical professions that are all involved in real estate, men, women,
different religions, different races, all walks of life.
9:12 Right.
9:12 So, I was like, ok, I, I can certainly see
myself fitting in here then when it came to the education, like I said, reading books
and so on and so forth and watching videos, webinars and so on and so forth.
9:22 I'm like, then I'm start going to the local,
you know, real estate group meetings right here in New Jersey in central New Jersey.
9:26 Of course, that's where I met Matt and Justin.
9:28 They belong to the same one, but I did go
ahead and I flipped a couple of homes here in New Jersey.
9:33 I said, let me go ahead and start small.
9:34 And so because that's what a lot was.
9:35 I was reading.
9:36 Oh, people can start in real part of their
early journey to go ahead and flip flip homes.
9:40 I did it many and I did not enjoy it.
9:43 I did not like it.
9:43 I'm keeping it real with you guys.
9:45 I will never flip a home again.
9:46 I, I told myself I want to expose myself to
more, more cash flow centric areas of real estate.
9:52 Obviously, that's not flipping.
9:53 That's when you start talking about rentals,
single family rentals, multifamily rental with a buddy of mine that I used to work with
on the street.
10:00 Him and I got involved on a four unit property
in Washington DC.
10:04 We had if you want to call it, you know, again,
rookie mistake over renovated it so much.
10:09 Our broker who had sold us a property is like,
listen, you guys, you guys upgraded this thing so much.
10:14 You can go ahead and sell these individual
units as condos.
10:16 So we did a condo conversion on this building,
which was a nightmare.
10:21 You gotta get legal involved.
10:23 You got to do condo conversion documents.
10:25 You've got to get certificates, you gotta
get, you know, DC housing to sign off on it.
10:30 Now there's new codes.
10:31 It was, wow.
10:32 Now the crazy thing is we did well on that
deal and we made some good money on that deal, but it was just, it was, it was painstaking,
it was painstaking.
10:40 So I said, all right, check that box not doing
that one again.
10:43 I don't kind of a thing.
10:44 So then it really, really focused on the rentals,
right?
10:47 Meeting Matt, meeting Justin, meeting other
people at this real meeting.
10:51 Start talking about the benefits really the
positives getting in the rentals as an investor as Syndicator.
10:56 And I'm like, OK, this makes sense.
10:58 Now I'm at a crossroads.
10:59 I either go into this on a solo basis or I
try to team up with some people knowing that if I go to a soul base, it's gonna take a
long time and it's gonna be real difficult.
11:08 Call it a blessing in disguise in meeting
that meeting Justin at the time that they were ramping their multifamily business, the
large part of it.
11:15 And then they were really looking for someone
to help them on the acquisition side because they have been looking for deals just all
over the country and they're like, wait a minute, we need to get more focus, we need
to drill down on what markets we really want to invest in.
11:26 So that's, you know, really how we met.
11:29 I believed right away that I'd be able to
go ahead and add value to Rosa again, not only because of my finance background, but
also because of my marketing and my sales background.
11:38 It sounds like you loved in this and start
businesses looking at them closely asserting their probabilities of success.
11:44 And then at some point, like a lot of us,
we get approached with, with real estate or we become aware of real estate and all the
benefits that I think a lot of us are wearing here and you kind of set your sights there.
11:55 You try to apply some of these same marketable
skills to real estate and you're learning as you're going.
12:00 And I think that's so great.
12:01 I think, I think it's great that you share
the condo story too because that's, that's a mistake I've made.
12:05 I know lots of people have made where you
get started in real estate and you know what you're good and what you're bad at what you
like and what you don't like when Irve met Matt, I've heard Matt give this story several
times.
12:14 Irve brought Matt and the group a deal.
12:17 So he has these marketable skills and he came
to the table with something and that's this, these are lessons I think that can apply to
everybody trying to get into the game value.
12:24 He brought really from day to zero, you know,
with these opportunities and the skills that he built over decades.
12:28 When Matt asked me to join the Rosa immediately,
I was like, OK, how can I go ahead and add value?
12:34 He saw it right?
12:35 But I wanted to make it actionable.
12:36 I wanted to let them see that early rather
than later.
12:40 So knew that they had not made a mistake betting
on me so to speak.
12:43 And so you're right, Vinny, I mean, I did
go ahead and, and bring them a deal to start analyzing.
12:47 I mean, I was really learning a lot myself
about analyzing real estate deals because again, I never analyzed the real estate deals.
12:54 All the years that I worked on the street
didn't know anything about a self directed Ira didn't know that you could invest with
a self directed Ira or all the benefits on, on the tax savings that you get depreciation
cost, segregation and so on and so forth.
13:09 10 31 roll ups.
13:10 I mean, none of this is taught to you in the
schools.
13:12 None of this is taught to you on the years
that you work on the street to buy and sell stock.
13:16 That's what their infrastructure is set up
on.
13:17 And obviously that's how they make their fees
and they're gonna pitch you their mutual funds and everything else like that.
13:21 But they don't make fees on introducing you
to real estate or helping you open up your first self directed Ira account.
13:28 So you can take portion of those funds to
go ahead and invest in real estate.
13:31 They don't want that out there, right?
13:33 Because that's gonna take fees away from them.
13:36 So as you probably know, man, when, as you
learn about real estate, you're finding out so much new objectives, new opportunities
on your own that you otherwise were not heard about if you did not immerse yourself in real
estate.
13:48 And it wasn't until I immersed in it and listen,
you're right.
13:50 I mean, it's not only what value can I bring
to a group that I'm joining, but I think it helped out.
13:58 I needed to have the mistakes that I did early
on in my real estate career.
14:02 I needed to make those mistakes.
14:03 I needed to make those errors because call
the process of elimination right away what you don't want to do, what you don't have
interest that allows you only in more to zero in to narrow down what you do have interest.
14:16 I couldn't be in a happier location, niche
within real estate that I'm in right now.
14:23 And that's all multifamily.
14:24 I realize that it's not flipping, it's not
single family rentals.
14:28 It's not the condos for me specifically, it's
multifamily.
14:32 Of course, stocks do pay dividends and you,
you can get paid out at, with your ownership.
14:36 But it's like you said before, very transactional.
14:38 A lot of the, a lot of the wealth is generated
through these transactions, buying and selling.
14:42 Whereas real estate, of course, there's huge
capital events when you buy and sell and those are usually great days, but they're also the
owning of the asset is the reward financially and a lot of and that, that's probably more
so true in real estate, especially with the tax depreciation and other benefits throughout,
throughout ownership from some of
the other asset classes.