I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there are two jobs for any syndicator or fund manager. Number one is finding investors and number two is finding assets to invest in. This is a blast from the past from when I used to coach syndicators and fund managers on how to start their own real estate syndication funds. The video is about two years old, or maybe a little bit more by the time you’re watching this video. But it goes into a deep dive into what that process looks like in order to find those best markets across the nation.
Alright, so I wanted to go more into marketing, or market analysis and demographics today. What I did was, I’m gonna switch to it. Good. Right. So what we’re gonna do today is we’re gonna look through some general market analysis that I did. As we talked about last time, my top eight markets are in no particular order: Seattle, Denver, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Columbus (Ohio), Charlotte, and Raleigh. So those were the main markets that I picked out, that we talked about last week by looking at who’s growing the most, and who has the right size of population, so that we’re choosing things that are actually growing, and that would be reasonable for investing in. You wouldn’t want to say, well, the 20-person town is growing at 50%, because 10 people moved in, and that just wouldn’t be any good. So these are places that are generally, I’m looking at growth rates above 1%. I’d love 2% or 2% plus, and we’re looking at it on a county-by-county basis. And that’s important, and we’ll see why.
I pulled up a demographic and income profile for the Phoenix area. I actually grew up in Scottsdale, so I know the area quite well. The Phoenix metropolitan service area is actually very, very large. Let’s actually pull it up so I can show you how large it is. When you’re doing demographics or market analysis of anything, you’re always looking at a sample size, and sometimes that sample is ginormous. As is the case here. There is a huge difference between this part down here, and the middle of the city right here. I mean, they’re two very, very different things. So that has to be taken into account primarily when you start looking at the data.
When I was sorting through what I was looking for, I wanted these large blocks of county information. It has to be taken into account because these areas are gonna grow. Probably some of them fast, like over here. But sometimes very, very slow. Like, this isn’t really in the area. But this place over here is growing at a much slower rate than the rest of the country. And we’re looking kind of at averages and we’re looking at bigger areas. This is showing us by zip code, these color blocks, so there are some parts that are growing much faster than others and some parts that are bigger.
That said, this is the demographic information that we pulled out for Phoenix. So here’s how I kind of look at things. First, I want to say I started at the top. Obviously, I always start with the demographic and income profile, because I care. You know, if we think about what the drivers are, the driver that affects everything is population, right? So population affects your apartments, your office, your industrial and your retail. Then employment starts affecting your office, your industrial and your retail, and then your spendable income affects primarily retail.
So in population, we’ve got a very large population base, because this is a very big area that it’s pulling from, but we still have a decent-sized growth. Now, the reason this number is smaller than that 2% that we saw last week, is because again, that surface area is much, much bigger. So I was zooming in on the counties like Maricopa County, that was at 2.2 point something percent, which is the main county for Phoenix and Scottsdale, and Mesa and Glendale, etc. But it doesn’t include the Indian reservations that are there. So 1.58% was still bigger than the national average. The national average is expected to be 0.71%.
We’ve got a slightly young demographic, which is something I would look for. I’m actually kind of surprised that it does skew younger than the national average. And then it is approaching the national average. We’ve got a growing area, growing faster than the rest of the state, growing faster than the nation. We’ve got households that are growing. So the difference between population and household really is per housing unit. Families is per actual family unit, because you could have people sharing. Roommates count as a household, but they don’t count as a family. And then ownership of homes is increasing and above the national average, and the median household income, which I’ve always cared about, is increasing as well.
I’m going to talk about households by income in a minute, because I’ve got a better comparison that shows it than what this does. So by population by age, what we’re really looking at is okay, well how does this break down. So we can see we’re in our double digits really in this swath between 25 and 65, which is pretty normal. And it trends throughout the time. So this is from the original census, this is the estimated number for the 2020 census, and then this is the predicted number as well for 2026. And so we still see that swath right in there, which is normal.
We have race and ethnicity. Generally, that’s not really a factor for what we’re doing. And then now here, we’re just seeing general trends. So population is growing faster than everybody. Households are growing faster than everybody. Families are growing faster than everybody. Same across the board. The only difference is the household income is actually growing more in the state than it is growing in the area, which is interesting.
One of the cities that we talked about is Columbus, Ohio. And here I want to talk about household income. Because here I would be a little bit concerned, and I would start doing a little bit more investigating. And then I’m going to show you how I look at it when it compares to Raleigh, which has actually a similar type thing.
So we’ve got our median household income at 2%. But the nation is expected to grow. I’m sorry, in 2021, we have a median trend of 2.04% versus 2.41%. So we’ve got half a percent, which is pretty significant on a growth rate, with the nation significantly more than the area that we’re surveying. Now, what I do next is I come down and I want to see what income brackets are really seeing that most amount of change. So we’re seeing a decline in these bottom-tiered incomes all the way down to here.
We’re seeing that decline. Of the population, 7.9% in 2021 were below $15,000, well, that drops to 6.7%. And so I’m seeing an overall decline until we get to $75,000. It starts increasing once we get to that $75,000 and up. So that tells me that okay, we are trending up in these upper income categories, which is what I would want to see. But we’re not seeing a huge shift.
When we look at something like Raleigh, and this isn’t just Raleigh, this is Raleigh and Durham combined, which is a good-sized area. But it’s a much broader demographic. And again, it’s kind of big. So I’m seeing 2.1% versus 2.4%. So I’d be a little concerned. But what gives me comfort here is I’ve got pretty big swings in these upper income brackets here. My people in the $150,000 and up category, you know, is 9.3% and 10.1%, going up to 11%. So that’s telling me, okay, all of my swings are really taking place in this category here. Really, it’s not until we get above $75,000 that we start seeing a swing, and then we get a pretty significant swing. So that gives me hope that the upper demographic is actually swinging up. And that’s kind of reflected in what we’re seeing in this shift in the median household income from what is currently in 2021 through 2026.
Let’s see, Phoenix might be useful, Houston’s actually a good example too. So again, this is just to give you kind of an idea and a flavor of the area. The other thing that I find very helpful, and I’d be happy to send these to you as well, we’re gonna send you all eight of these packages. So I’m going to send you for all of those cities that I’ve defined, we’re going to put in the for download, in the Knowledge Library, we’ll put all eight of both the tapestry and the demographic and income profile. So they’ll be there for you, you can look at those.
But here is your invitation: please just let me know where you want demographics for. If you’ve got a particular market, we can do a deep dive into that, which is actually one of the things we’re going to talk about next week. What I’d like to have happen is for people to tell me where they want to run, you know, whether that’s where do you think your dominant area is going to be? We’ll run those demographics, and then we’ll start looking at what that is. And then we’ll craft what the messaging would be about the area to investors. So I think that would be a useful and interesting exercise.
Now, tapestries are pretty interesting. A tapestry is a technology that came up that’s derived by ESRI. So it is just, a tapestry is another word for a psychographic profile, which basically takes all of the information that exists both in demographics and spending habits and makes predictions about who these people are and what kind of categorized category you could put them into.
So here’s the urban chic one. We’ve got the average number of households that are predicted to be in that average household size. This is a very good way to start to get a handle on not only your area at large, but also in the area about what’s important and about what spending habits are gonna look like. So I’ve used this before to make a case for certain retail positions to say, you know, these are people who primarily eat organic foods, drink imported wine, they appreciate a good cup of coffee. So if I’ve got a retail center that’s got a great coffee shop, it supports that. Okay, that’s going to be a good tenant, that tenant should do well. It also gives me kind of an idea of what their overall spending habits are. And ultimately, these are where those main demographics are located throughout the country. They’re interesting in and of themselves in a smaller area, I mean, in a broad set.
Let’s do my office for fun. That’s a very strange way to look at my office. Yes, that is where my office is. Okay. This just looks funny here because of how they laid it out. Oh, that’s showing all of Calabasas. That’s interesting. That looks better. That looks funny having it up there. Okay. So this is my office building, right there I sit.
So what we can do is we can build out several rings and get very specific kind of information about our business itself. So we can do that either by just creating rings of mileage, or by drive time, or by walk time. Now we are a driving area. But for what I want to talk about, I actually just want to look at a two-mile radius around my office. Okay, so this is the radius around where I work. And let’s get a dominant tapestry profile.
This one takes a little bit longer to run, but you’ll start seeing in detail a little bit more trends when you look at it in a huge map. Like here, it’s so hard to pick out, you know, it’s like, well, what, the building I’m looking at is there and that doesn’t really tell me very much. But when we start looking in more detail like here, now we start seeing okay, now this is what we’re talking about. All of these people belong to affluent estates and/or the upscale avenues. Everybody is within this. Is that right?
So, within these color codes, affluent estates is this one, designated by the number one, urban chic is designated by the number two. And so we get into more detail about what they specifically are. So if my building is in a 1A, that means they are top tier. So now I’m starting to get more and more information about who these people are. They skew slightly older, the average age is 38 for the US, here it’s 47. It also has the average incomes and the median net worths as compared to the rest of the country.
But then I do like how it talks about, so I can kind of get to know who these people are. They buy luxury cars. They contribute to arts and cultural organizations. I wouldn’t go that far, but okay, sure. They use services for property and garden maintenance. Yeah, so everybody has a gardener here. That’s true. Everybody has a housekeeper. That’s true. It kind of gives me an interesting perspective on what’s going on.
Now, this is for the demographic profile, or the psychographic profile. The median house value here is not $890,000. But it just gives you kind of an idea about where they fall and who they tend to be. And what that does is that gives you better talking points when you’re talking to your investor about who those people are that are in your surrounding area.
So it may matter a lot. If the people in, say, your office building, and all the people around that office building tend to be professionals, you’ve got a pretty good case that this is probably going to be most attractive to your lawyers and insurance agents and things like that. Or if it’s medical office, obviously doctors, it’s going to be the higher-end medical services. Whereas other areas may have less of a demand for certain things and more of a demand for other things.
You’re not going to find, and there’s, I think there’s one apartment building. Yeah, there’s only one apartment building that I can think of in Calabasas. There probably are more, but I can only think of one. So I wouldn’t go in there saying it’s gonna be a great market for apartment buildings. While it could be, you’re gonna probably have some problems. Whereas if you’re looking to do high-end homes, or you’re looking to do professional office, or you’re looking to do high-end retail, it’s a great place for it. If you’re looking to put in a Food 4 Less, not a good area. There is a Food 4 Less about two miles away, but it’s not in the city.
So that just gives you kind of a background in terms of how I look at demographics or psychographics as it relates to what we’re talking about. So your assignment is to message me just, you know, I would like either this city, or I’d like a five-mile ring around this address or in this whole county or something. Send me a message of what you want demographics for, we’ll look at them, and we’ll go through it. And we’ll say, well, this is interesting. These are the things that are really good, and that I would talk about. And these are the things that aren’t so good. Like, if I’m having a negative growth rate, I wouldn’t certainly make it the big thing that I’m touting. But I probably would address the fact that it exists because you want to get that out there as well.
A good example is I was doing a syndication where one of the people asked about what the education system was like, you know, in terms of schools. Does it have good schools, and what the population growth was like? One of the people I was working with on that deal went and told that investor that oh, the schools are top of the country and the growth rate is phenomenal. Completely untrue. He was just being a salesperson. But absolutely not true. That person, oddly enough, chose not to invest. I don’t know whether they knew that it was not a truthful statement. There was a statement that I just overheard. And it was completely off the mark. And I don’t know how many other people they told that to.
Because what I don’t want to have happen is for those negative things that do exist in every property and every situation, I don’t want them to be lied about because then at some point, somebody’s going to find out, and then I’m going to get called on it. And I’ve just lost all my credibility. So it’s good to know all of the sore points and all of the good points. And then you just look more professional when you disclose the points that aren’t so good. And you just say, you know, look, the growth rate in this general area isn’t so good. It’s not terrible. But here’s why that actually doesn’t matter to us. Because what we’re doing is we’re doing XYZ, and you put a spin on it about why it’s not really a negative and overcome that. What would be an objection about that before it’s even brought up? The fact that you brought it up just makes you look more professional.
Alright, let’s say I now want to go through my own mode yet. Okay? Let me open up, just bear with me one second. Figure out how I bring this up. So what we’ve done here, this is a find properties spreadsheet. Now it looks similar to the spreadsheet that I’ve given you before on finding investors. But it kind of lays out the very, very basics. The point isn’t really to use this spreadsheet as the only way to do it. The point for this spreadsheet is, here’s an easy way to do it, just start doing it and start logging.
So I’ve broken down the finding properties into three different things that you should be doing. The first is database. Second is agents. And the third is CIA. CIA stands for commercial information exchange, which is your LoopNet, your Crexi, your CoStar, your Catalyst, your MLS, all those things are your CIAs.
So database, we’ve got here, I want you to go through and just start building of the properties that are in your database that you think are likely that match your founder investment theory.
Just start logging those in, put in who the owner is, and then decide, you know, what’s the best way to get a hold of the owner, meet with the owner, see if they’ll take an offer. This is the same thing a lot of you do when you’re talking for, you know, getting a listing. But here you’re talking for yourself. And so at the very least, it’s another way to have a conversation with them. But this is a way where your brokerage business can feed directly into your business as a syndicator.
And lastly, you know, what are those notes? I see the best is probably a little tiny. Let me zoom it in. So you know, it’s got these fields and it’s got a notes field. I would highly recommend to just do this and get it done. Just what are those key properties? Because most of you probably want a property. And so that’s why you haven’t really gotten started. And if that’s the case, here’s a way you can go through your database, see what’s in existence and start just putting properties down.
The second way is real estate agents. So I’ve advocated before that a great way to find properties is to start talking to agents. It’s probably worth incentivizing them without them maybe being able to take a brokerage fee and double-end the deal. If that’s valid in your state, which probably is, I think almost all states let you double-end. And so in this case, they could double-end and make double the commission. And you’ll know, but you’ll then have a good property to syndicate or split it with them or come up with something in order to do so.
This is just a basic list that you can build out just like our other list of people to contact. So to build out a name, a list of who are those people? What is the product type they typically work in? Make sure these are within your founder investment theory. You don’t want to be talking to an office guy when all you’re really interested in is land, right? It just wouldn’t make any sense. You know what geographic area they specialize in, and then just start meeting with them and getting a hold of them and talking about what’s going on, buy them a cup of coffee and see what it is. Because at the end of the day, they may not even have your product, but they may be able to, they may know some investors that will go into your deal as well.
The last is your commercial information exchanges. So what I’m recommending that you do here is start building out your searches. For example, I’ve got searches on Crexi, and LoopNet, and CoStar for exactly what I’m looking for. And it emails me whenever something new comes on the market. Now, some of the markets are a little hot, and so there’s not a lot coming on the market. And they’re getting sold before it hits the market. But at least I’m getting notified as soon as it hits the market. These probably aren’t where your deals are coming from. But they may still, and so it’s worth watching and knowing and you’re also just going to know your market a little bit better.
So you do this anyway, for when you’re repping buyers, you build out a search in the MLS for them or you build out a search for them on retail properties, if that’s what they want to buy. You build it out for them. And it’s kind of a nice thing, they get these emails. Well, you just do it for yourself, because you are repping yourself.
So this is the finding properties spreadsheet, let me show you. And so I will be sending this out as well. Now it would make, I think it would definitely be a swell idea to start using this or some other way. So the reason I’m giving this is because I think they’re kind of useful forms. And I like using Excel for them. But also to encourage you to start thinking about properties in a more structured way. Once things are written down, you’re much more likely to take action and make progress than if it’s not.
Alright, so once I have and I show you this, because I think a lot of people aren’t, don’t have any active deals right now. But this is how I keep track of it. And I want to take down the confusion about how to do it. Now rather than have there being some fear about well, once I get it in, then I suddenly have to do all this work.
So one thing. So this is the last investors, this is the total amount being raised, the price per membership unit, estimated close date. And then we just are starting to list out names. Now these are names from your database, this is names from your sphere of influence. This can absolutely come from the other spreadsheet that we gave back in, I think it was August 4. That was when we gave that sheet. So if you want to look at the August 4 rapid implementation call, that’s where that is.
Then it has the necessary steps. Now this assumes a 506(c), which most of you are going to be doing. So did they receive a brochure? You know, simple question, that brochure or pitch deck, did they receive? Did they receive a PPM yet from you? When did you pitch them formally? Did they give you a soft commit? And so for my definition, a soft commit is somebody who says yeah, that sounds like something I’d put $50,000 or $75,000 into, or $50,000 into, something like that.
After you’ve gotten the soft commit, then it’s at that point, we send it to accreditation. Accreditation costs money so that’s why unless I get a soft commit, I’m probably not going to send it for accreditation. So the cost of accreditation, if you use Early IQ which we have a link for, is, I believe it’s $55 per accreditation. And so you know, you can either pass that on to investors, which is fine. But if they’re not really willing to give you a soft commit, they’re not going to spend $55 anyway. And you’re certainly not going to spend $55 for somebody who’s just kind of on the fence, it’s a waste of money.
Once you hear back from them and find out if they’re accredited, then you move on to what their firm commitment is. Now I’ve decided I’m going to do $100,000, great, sign the subscription agreement, then you get the funds in there. This was just for testing.
And then what we’re doing here, why this is swell, is because you’re always trying to keep track of where you’re at on any given point on there. So I haven’t printed this up yet for you, but you’ll get the point. It’s, you know, how many of my prospects in this list haven’t I contacted yet? How many are alive? How many are just unconverted? You know, like, how many are there that are still alive and I’ve pitched but I haven’t converted to them giving me any kind of number? They just said, let me think about it. Or how many people gave me a soft commit? So yeah, I’d probably do $200,000. How many of them have finished the accreditation process? And how many signed the subscription agreements have you got?
Because at the end of the day, what you’re really looking for is these dollars. So you know, really dollars that I still need to get in my bank account is $900,000. I still need $900,000. Now I’ve received $100,000 from John Adams, he gave me $100,000. But I still need the amount remaining. If I count, if I start counting my people who gave me firm commits, you know, what is that looking like? So let’s say Thomas Jefferson gave me a firm commit of $50,000. Okay, so if my firm commits come in, then I really only need $850,000. And then if I keep track of well, but George Washington told me he was probably in for $250,000. Well, okay, if I convert him, I’ve got $600,000.
Just trying to give eyeballs on where you are at any given point. Because, I mean, this is the number that really matters, the number of dollars that are in the bank. At least let you know, okay, I’ve got a pretty big disconnect here. I need to bridge that gap by converting this $400,000 in order to make it happen. And I gotta fix this calculation, because it’s adding up people who already committed. So before I send it out, I’ll fix that up. Oh, no, that’s correct. So the $400,000, so this is soft committed dollars, but it’s actually soft committed dollars less firm, less received. So this is counting it that way. So my mistake, because the calculation is right, it just didn’t have the right title.
I hope you found that video helpful. My name is Tilden Moschetti. I am a syndication attorney with the Moschetti Syndication Law Group. If we can help you put together a real estate syndication or fund or find capital for your business or whatever it is that you’re looking to use Regulation D for.