Outrunning Failures

Secrets to Successful Syndication with Jeff Greenberg

• Vish Muni • Episode 21

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Today's guest is Jeff Greenberg.

Jeff is the CEO and Founder of Synergetic Investment Group, a firm specializing in real estate investments. With nearly 20 years of experience in the industry, including 13 years as a multifamily syndicator, Jeff has established himself as a prominent figure in real estate investment. He currently manages two customizable and diversified private equity funds, known as SIG Wealth Funds. These funds boast a diverse portfolio, including over 2,000 multifamily units, 500 mobile home park spaces, 74 short-term rental homes, a debt fund, and more than 5,000 Bitcoin miners.

Jeff's primary focus is on identifying and presenting high-quality investment opportunities to Synergetic's investors. He works with top-tier operators to ensure that these investments are well-managed and poised for success. His dedication to sourcing the best opportunities in the market reflects his commitment to the growth and prosperity of his investors.

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Creator/Main Host: Vish Muni

Show Advisor/Editing: DBT Marketing

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>> Vish:

welcome to another episode of Outrunning Failures. Today we have another fantastic guest It's none other than Jeff Greenberg is the CEO and founder of Synergetic Investment group, and he's been a real estate investor for over ten years. He's a family man, and he likes outdoor cycling, and he loves spending time with family and helping other investors with that. Jeff, welcome to outrunning failures.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, thank you for having me. This is going to be fun.

>> Vish:

Jeff, can you please tell the audience a little about your background and what got you into real estate investing?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, my background was actually in it. I worked for a large technology company, and, I was actually going through a divorce when I realized that the money I had put away for retirement wasn't going to be sufficient when my ex was going to get the house. So, I figured I had to do something. So I started learning about real estate, mainly, on the single family side. I was looking at bank owned properties, Reos, and it wasn't a great time for them. This was in about 2005, 2006, when the banks were getting so many foreclosed properties, they didn't know what to do with them. And so I started looking into commercial real estate, went to some seminars, and learned that I could leverage the money that I did have, along with other people's funds, and buy commercial real estate. And so that was kind of what got me started on the path to commercial real estate.

>> Vish:

That's fantastic. Thank you, Jeff. And so you learn from the school of hard knocks. In other words, a lot of it.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Was the, definitely there was hard, hard knocks.

>> Vish:

Okay, that's good. And now, after, after being in real estate investing for over ten years, you're not only, an investor, you're also investing in commercial properties. That is a, ah, multifamily apartment complexes. And I see you're also a syndicator. Correct.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

I have one property left that syndicated. The rest of them have been sold off, and I've moved on to the next phase, which is with my funds, which I believe we'll talk about later.

>> Vish:

Right. That's fantastic. Now, in your investing career, have you had any, investments which have challenged you to the point that, has made you a better investor? Can you pick one? I know we all have challenges, multiple challenges, and, I got to just pick one. Which has changed you for to be a better investor?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. There's so many that we could spend an hour talking about them. but the one that I think would probably be the most beneficial to your audience is picking, a proper, inspector. When you're having your properties inspected, you should always, whenever you're, acquiring a property, before you close on it, is have an inspector looking at the property. And one thing that we probably didn't do as well as we should have is vetted that inspector. and we made the mistake of taking an inspector that was referred to us by the broker, and that's not, you know, that's probably not an alignment of interest. He wants to get the deal closed. He doesn't care if I find all the problems. And we found out that there was a lot of things that our inspector missed that they should have pointed out to us while we were in our due diligence period, because there was a lot of things. I also had a pool inspector come out and gave us the green light, said everything was great. Then before we were closing, my lender calls me up and said, hey, we just found out the city has sighted the property and with code violations on your pool. And I'm sure. Wait a minute. We just had a pool inspector come out, and he said everything was fine. How do we have these code violations? now, fortunately, we hadn't closed on the property yet, so the seller had to go and take care of the code violations. But just the fact that the inspector missed it, just made me furious. And there was other things that the inspector, had missed that the lender. Typically your lender will also have a property inspector before they give you the loan. They'll have their property inspector go out, and it's a little unnerving when you see their property inspector's report and compare it to your property inspector's report, and they have a lot more relevant items than your inspector did. So very important to make sure you get a good property inspector and you inspect all the different things, the roof, the electrical, the plumbing, foundation, all different things, especially when you're buying big properties. Very critical.

>> Vish:

Well, Jeff, that is so important. So far, I've never heard anyone say, talk about how important inspection was, and, I'm with you on it. I've gone. I just, want the inspection to be over. So I just go with some referrals, whoever comes by quickly. And instead of me waiting for three weeks, I would say I want it done as of yesterday. So. But, and I'm with you on that, because that is so critical and so important, and all your capex budget and how you structure the deal is going to make a world of a difference. And I think that is extremely important. I think going forward, I'm going to tell all my audience to do a background check or find out a little more about the inspector.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah, get a sample of the reports, what kind of things they're looking at and finding, especially if you're dealing with older properties. a lot of newer investors are going to the older properties because they can get them at a better value. And what's hidden under the ground and what's hidden behind the walls and, are things that could cause you a disaster down the road. So getting an inspector that can at least give you a good idea of what's going on, is extremely important.

>> Vish:

Well, apart from that, and if the city steps in, it's another disaster waiting to happen.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. Well, one of the things that now, this one I don't blame on the inspector because, I don't believe there was any way that he was going to find it. But there was a, we had a gas leak, and so we went and had a plumber come in and fix the gas leak. And then, it failed. It failed the test. It failed. And we said, okay, we're going to have the plumber come out and fix again. And they said, no, you can't come out and fix it. It's been fixed too many times. You have to replace it. And we would have to replace from the boiler all the way to the street, which we thought was going to be in the six figures. fortunately, it was only about 30,000. And we were excited. We were, you know, that was the best 30,000 spending that just to replace that pipe. But that was something. And we did go to building and safety, and looked at permits to see what, repairs had been done in the past, because that's a great way of doing it, going to the city and seeing if you see a lot of permits in there for plumbing, problems, that's a good indication of what's going on underneath your property. But there really wasn't anything there. So, you know, I don't know what we could have done differently on that one, but, yeah, that was a surprise.

>> Vish:

Well, that's good to know that. So how do you mitigate that risk going forward? What are the checks you do on?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, definitely having an inspector that knows his business. I would get a separate, roofing contractor to come out and give you, estimates on the roof. Typically, your regular inspectors don't do much on that. if it's a big property, you may want, someone coming out looking at your foundation, I've had, properties that had a little bit of cracks and so we wanted to know what the cracks were about. And so we had a foundation guy come out and look at that. It ended up, it was just in the facade. It was a tree root that was cracking. Ah, part of the brick siding and the foundation was fine. I. But it's good to know. The other thing is on, on sewer scope, running, a camera down your sewer pipes and making sure that you get it all the way into the building, not just outside of the building, but under the building. You're going to pay a little bit extra for that, but it's better that you know it ahead of time. But the other thing is, is making sure you're pad your, your capex budget. You can't, you can't be chintzy on the capex budget. If you're in, older, older properties, you get older properties, you know, there's stuff that you're not going to see from the inspection.

>> Vish:

So, so do you, you raise money for all your, syndications and do you have any percentage of the property value in terms of capex? Do you raise that money up front?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, it's going to depend on, on each of the buildings as far as, you know, what the age, what the age is of the building, you know, I'm trying to remember offhand, I haven't syndicated in a while. I don't remember the percentage per, say, per door. but, you know, if it's, if it's say, a hundred unit property, you're, you're probably. Well, it also depends on how much in the way repairs you're going to do or new renovation. So I would probably at least have a half a million in there to a million, you know, for 100 unit property. And that doesn't count upgrades, you know, because you're going to have a lot of upgrades as well. So you need a pretty good chunk of change. And if you don't need that, you know, you know, you're, you're at least better off as far as the reserves. You know, that's, you always need a rainy day fund.

>> Vish:

Yeah, definitely. You can't go wrong with that. You might as well have money than not having, and running into trouble and, and losing tenants and one, one affix another, the delinquencies and the performance, you.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Start spiraling, spiraling downhill. If you, you know, if you don't, get the repairs taken care of, one thing leads to the next.

>> Vish:

Right? Yeah. If you don't want that to happen.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

No, no. I mean, if you can't repair things and you start losing tenants, you start losing tenants, you don't have enough money to do the repairs. And it just keeps going, it keeps cycling around. that's probably one of the biggest things that I look back on as a error that we made, was not sufficiently raising money. Now, on a particular deal. We knew that the, lender was going to, provide us with, $1.5 million worth of capex. And so that's what our plan was to use the 1.5. The problem was when other things came up, like that gas line and some other issues came up, we could use that 1.5 for those things. We had to use the money for those things we specified in our business plan. And then when we used up that 1.5 and still didn't have enough because we didn't raise additional money, then all of a sudden you're hurting. And if your operations can't carry that, that's when you get in a real pinch. So, that would be number one, I guess, is making sure you have sufficient reserves for the unexpected.

>> Vish:

Well, that is so easy and so easy to miss out on that also, people would say, well, I need to close the deal, so. And people would take too many things for granted. It's going to come back to bite them.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. Well, also you're trying to squeeze the returns as much as possible, and the more money you raise from investors, the lower the returns are going to be. So you've got a balancing act between how much extra you're going to raise for a rainy day fund and protect the investor or the investment and the investors. And then the other side of it is how much is that going to hurt the returns that you're going to be able to project for investors. So you've got that balancing act.

>> Vish:

Well, that's good. So I see you're a CEO and founder of Synergetic investment group. Could you tell us a little bit about what exactly does a group do and when was it founded?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

the group was actually, we founded it, actually in about 2010 when we bought our first property. and for, what, about 1213 years after that, we had been acquiring both multifamily and student housing properties. And now Synergetic is now running two equity funds, two, customizable private equity funds where instead of operating the deals, we find good quality operators and we invest with them in, all different commercial, real estate assets in, fact, some of them actually aren't commercial real estate. we've got one investment, which is 70, short term rentals that we're in a fund with 70, short term rentals. We got mobile home parks. Right now we're looking at possibly investing in a fund that buys businesses, non real estate related businesses. So we're doing all different kinds of things, helping, our investors diversify their portfolio, and not just in real estate.

>> Vish:

So what kind of a fund do you have?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

well, as far as what regulation we do 506 c and a 506 b, if that's what you're talking about.

>> Vish:

Yes.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. Well, we have. I have two different funds, but they're customizable in that we bring deals into them and investors get to decide whether or not they want to be in that deal. So not everybody in the fund is in every deal.

>> Vish:

Okay.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

So it's like individual, as if you're picking individual deals to be in, but it's all under the same umbrella. And basically for all your deals, you would get one k. One. So it's all under the same umbrella.

>> Vish:

So it's a customizable fund.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

It's a customizable fund and people could self diversify.

>> Vish:

Okay, that's, good to know that.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. Some of the deals right now we're looking for deals that are heavier on cash flow. Most of the people in, multifamily realize that cash flow typically isn't real high on multifamily. You're going to get your returns at the end, but during the hold is usually pretty low returns. So we're looking at some opportunities right now that are going to be much higher, cash flow during the hold and then a, ah, pretty nice, return at the end as well.

>> Vish:

All right, so that's good to know that you looking for good operators and also business to diversify your investments.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. And the operators are key. The operators are key. And I know that from being an operator that, the most important thing is who's running the deal.

>> Vish:

I mean, that is always great because it's like I tell people, if you're a athlete, right? So you're mountain biking. I mean, you're road bike.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Road biking. Yeah.

>> Vish:

So I could buy a $20,000 bike and if you don't know how to ride, then it is. It's of no use, right? So not just having the bike and not just having the right property of managing, that makes all the difference. Right. Because that person, if he doesn't know how to ride. If he doesn't know the basics, they're going to crash sooner or later.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

We bet on the jockey, right?

>> Vish:

Yeah, definitely. Because I tell people they're the ones who will take you through the storms. They don't abandon ship.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah. And they have the experience how, to get, you know, they know what to do if there's problems and they're going to, you know, make it through the rough waters.

>> Vish:

So, so is there, is there any criteria you look for? You look for how many, full cycle deals they've done or how long have they been in the business or what is your criteria for operator?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Both of those. definitely, we want to know how many, full cycles, you know, typically we want three or four full cycle, on the property. If we're talking real estate and properties, we want to know how, how long the team has been working together, what's their relationship, what's their responsibilities. If it's, if we're talking about real estate, I want to know who the asset manager is, you know, who's going to be the one working with property management. you know, it just, I need to know all the different roles, that each person in the business is playing and how well they'll work together and how long they've been together. and the other thing is with partnerships, you always want to know what happens if you guys decide to break up the partnership, if you guys stop getting along. you're always hearing about partnerships breaking, up. so you want to know how long have they been working with each other?

>> Vish:

Yeah, I think that's a key to any deal, I think because most of the time the operators get started on the right foot, but they run into obstacles as we move along things, deals tend to fall apart.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

And one of my pet peeves is, communication. I want to know what's going on without having to ask, you know. I like looking at a lot of reports, either monthly or quarterly. what's going on with the property? I, want to know, you know, I want to know details. And a lot of times I'll dig into the financials when they come in, so I could see ahead of time that there's problems going on. I don't want to know at the last minute that they've been having a problem for the last six months. I want to know and if I could be of any help, I'll put my input in. we do come in at the LP side, so we don't have a big voice as far as what they're doing, but maybe we can help out and at least have a heads up if things aren't going as well as they should be.

>> Vish:

That's fantastic. So what is your superpower in a deal? It is difficult to be everywhere all the time, and it's difficult to do everything in a deal. And because since you all also have a fund, and you're also looking for operators, you're looking for deals, you're looking for businesses to invest. So which one is your favorite and why do you do that?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, my superpower is being able to stand in the background and sit there and be able to look at all these different sponsors and get to meet them and to learn, about them. I'm not involved in the operations except for the one property that I have for sale. I do have one student, housing property. Once I sell that one, I'll be totally out of operations. But my superpower is being in this business for the last 13, years and understanding the ins and outs of running a business, because commercial, real estate operations is a business. And coming from that aspect, I know a lot of people that are raising equity for deals, and they have never done the deals, they have never done operations. They don't know all of those little ins and outs. Now, that's not to say that I know every different kind of business. My experience is in multifamily and student housing. We've bought mobile home parks. So we have some people that, we're working with that are experts on the mobile home parts. So they help evaluate the mobile home short term rentals. We've got people that are doing short term rentals. we're looking at self storage. We haven't gotten into self storage yet, but we're looking for experts in those areas. And so when we're evaluating it, we have people in our group, of other fund managers that have expertise in those areas as well as buying businesses. We have some people with expertise on buying businesses. And so now we're looking at a fund that buys businesses. And so we're bringing in expertise to help us out on those. Because, as I said, my experience is more with student housing and multifamily.

>> Vish:

well, that's not as good to know that we can't be experts in everything because, ah, I tell people it's like if you're driving 100 miles an hour, ah, you know what? What is extremely important is to focus what's in front of you. Not at the side or not at the back. Right?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Exactly right. Don't chase every squirrel. You got to find your lane. Find what? You become an expert in whatever it is that you're pursuing and become an expert. And then if you want to go on to some other asset type or something else, that's fine. But you can't be jumping, you know, from multifamily to, you know, student housing to. To self storage to mobile home parks to whatever else, you need to either become an expert in those areas or bring somebody on your team that is an expert that can help you, you know, learn that area.

>> Vish:

Right. So. So, Jeff, we all. We all have, a lot of things going on with, apart from. Apart from investing and, raising capital and doing deals. So what are you passionate about? What gets you up in the morning every day? What gets you going all day? Because, it is not very motivating for all of us to get up every morning because there are good times, there are bad times, but we'll have to get moving. One step in front of another. And what is that one thing? And, what is your biggest why? Which gets you going?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, if we're talking about why, it's leaving a legacy for my. For my, kids and my grandchildren. it used to be, you know, getting to my retirement, and I've already gotten to that, and I'm still working, but it's on my time now. But leaving a legacy for my family, is my big why. But the other piece of it is I get excited about finding good opportunities and helping investors get into opportunities. I have people all the time, coming to me and asking me how you find good deals, which, first is the wrong question. but what they really should be asking is where can they find good sponsors that have good deals? And so they don't know where to find the deals or the sponsors. And that's what excites me about my funds, that that's what we do. And we do it in such a way that investors can get equal to or better than what they would get going straight into the deal and have me helping them out and finding those deals. And the way we do that is we come in with a large check, and by coming in with a larger check, we get better economics. So I could make my money off of the delta. The difference between what the investors get and what we negotiate with the sponsor. So my payment, what I live on, or what I receive out of this doesn't come from the investors. It comes from the sponsor. It doesn't affect the investors. The investors get the same or better, and they've got someone like me looking, after them and keeping an eye on the project. And that excites me that I could help other people out, get into quality deals.

>> Vish:

So that, that's good to know, because everybody needs some handholding every now and then and then, especially when they're getting started, they definitely need to have a great mentor who's been there, who's done that. And, because they're going to follow you because it's, for them, they don't know anything. It's, so that way it is. It, looks like educating people to get onto deals is what excites you also at the same time.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Oh, absolutely, yeah. And once they get into the fund or on my list, they get to see all the deals that come by, and they get to pick and choose which ones they want to be in. And we try to get a variety of deals, in the different funds, and, people get to decide which ones they like and which ones they don't want to be in.

>> Vish:

All right, so that is good to know. So what's your normal check size? You invest? Is it any minimum or look for any bigger?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

You talk about investors or what?

>> Vish:

I say investments.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, the investments, we may, and the fund may invest, anywhere from 500,000 to 2 million. but it's going to depend on the particular deal, how much we'll put into the deal. The more now, I'm affiliated with, other fund managers, and we will, negotiate with sponsors an accumulated dollar amount, so we could get up to, say, $2 million. It may end up being four or five fund managers that are bringing in their own investors. And so that way we can negotiate better terms. Okay. Now, my fund may bring in 500,000, somebody else may bring 200,000, whatever. But we accumulate that and invest that in these deals and get better terms because we're bringing in these big checks.

>> Vish:

All right, so in that case, would I be, You will be the point of contact, or should I be talking to all the other fund managers?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

No, you would only be contacted with me. The other fund managers would have no idea who you are as an investor. You would work with me, and I would answer all the questions. And if there was anything my investors had questions that I wasn't sure of, I go to the sponsor, I go to the person running the deal and get the question answered from them. If it's something I couldn't answer all.

>> Vish:

Right, so now that's, good to know, because the way I do business is I want to keep things as simple as possible. Because.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

And I would be the one issuing the k one, and the investors would get the one k one from the fund. Even if they were in five deals or ten deals or whatever it was, you, would get one k one. Yeah.

>> Vish:

Because I just want to make, the investment as friendly as possible and easy to understand because it's, it's like the iPhone. IPhone is all about presentation. The look and feel is what everybody buys space for.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah.

>> Vish:

And me. And you don't want to know how complicated the program is in the back end, right?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Yeah.

>> Vish:

And if someone tries to explain to us, we may not even buy the iPhone, we might go to Android or something else. Right. Yeah. So.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

And typically, your, your investors are of know, running their own business or, you know, doing. I mean, we have a lot of doctors and, you know, high end business people. They're busy. They're busy doing their business. They're busy making the money. They want their money to work as hard as they do.

>> Vish:

So it's the ease of doing business, and the experience is what makes. Makes a deal.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. We want to make it as easy as possible.

>> Vish:

Yeah. And it's up to me and you to make that, to give them that experience.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. Right.

>> Vish:

the way you started itself is very motivating and inspiring to a lot of people because, you started, you took, you took action in spite of, you did not expect a lot of things to turn out that way, but you took action. You want to make sure you had housing, you want to make sure that you want to do something. And, you told me how you started as a single family investor, and you started, in 2005, right? 2005 or 2006.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

I tried to start in 2005.

>> Vish:

Right. So. And in other words, a lot of people at your, situation would sort of give up and be depressed and get back to what were they like to do, and nobody's watching, so. But you just turn that whole situation to your advantage. That is extremely inspiring. Thank you for that. And, what would you do if you are not in real estate and if you add all the money in the world?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, I'd probably be doing a lot more traveling.

>> Vish:

Okay.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

I enjoy traveling. There's, plenty of places that I haven't seen. so I'd probably do a lot of that. I might be traveling with my grandkids, taking them around. but I enjoy family, and I enjoy doing things with, with family, and, you know, being able to work, you know, hang out with the young kids.

>> Vish:

So what, what is that one thing you will stop doing? And what is that one thing you will not stop doing?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

One thing I would stop, oh, I would stop doing if I had all the money in the world.

>> Vish:

Yeah.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Wow. I don't know. I mean, I enjoy the funds. I'd probably bring somebody else on to run the funds.

>> Vish:

Okay.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Because doing the management of the funds and all of that stuff isn't the most fun. but I still enjoy doing the deals. So that would probably be the main thing, is I would have somebody else doing all the stuff in the background, but I still work with people. I still like working with people and investors and educating them. So I still enjoy that part of it.

>> Vish:

Yeah, that's good to know. So what, is the next thing for synergetic investment group next one year? What are you planning to accomplish?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, there's several things that we have in the pipeline that we're looking at. I mentioned a company that buys businesses. We're looking at possibly, investing with them. We're also looking at, somebody that's acquiring somebody we've invested with before that's acquiring a bunch of mobile home parks. We may invest with them. we're just looking at different investments. And as I said, typically alternatives and not so much multifamily. Right now, we have quite a bit of multifamily that we've invested in, so I'm staying a little bit away from them for right now. Maybe next year we might get some multifamily, but right now there's a bunch of other things that look better, the returns look better, and the risks aren't much different.

>> Vish:

well, we're all investors. We look for opportunities and we look for something which cash flows, so it doesn't matter. Today's real estate, tomorrow it's something else.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Exactly. Exactly.

>> Vish:

So one other thing is, so do you have anything to promote? What are you working on?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, like I said, I have these opportunities coming up. people can get onto my list, to hear about opportunities, they could scan this, qr code, that I just put up there. And I have a giveaway for your investors. it's, questions to ask a sponsor before you get into a deal as a passive investor. Those people that want to be passive investors in deals, and that you could go to sigcere.com sponsor, and they could get questions, ask a deal sponsor before you invest with them. There's a couple things on there, and if anybody wants to be on the list, we'll let you know what new opportunities are coming up.

>> Vish:

Well, that's good to know, Jeff. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And this podcast is all about outrunning your failures and, with listening to you and your journey and how you got started. Man, that is totally inspiring. One more time. I know I repeated that in the past, but I I can say it again, but that is truly inspiring. Thank you once again for coming on this podcast, Jeff.

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Well, thank you very much for having me. I mean, everybody is going to have some bumps in the road. It's just how you handle those bumps in the road, is what really matters.

>> Vish:

Well, what I tell people is, remember, setbacks are opportunities in disguise, so let's keep pushing forward and enjoy the journey, right?

>> Jeff Greenberg:

Absolutely. And who was it Robert Kiyosaki that used to say, if you're going to fail, fail faster. Fail faster?

>> Vish:

Exactly. Thank you, Jeff, once again, thank you for having me.