Lisa Hylton is a real estate investor, syndicator and a CPA with approximately 15 years of experience in the financial services industry. Lisa is the founder of Axcel Capital -a real estate investment company that provides opportunities for investors to invest in 100+ unit Class B apartment buildings. Lisa is also the host of The Level Up REI podcast
Her mission is to provide opportunities particularly to Caribbean Investors living in the Caribbean or in the US to invest passively in US Real Estate to build long term wealth and financial freedom.
Lisa Hylton is a real estate investor, syndicator and a CPA with approximately 15 years of experience in the financial services industry. Lisa is the founder of Axcel Capital -a real estate investment company that provides opportunities for investors to invest in 100+ unit Class B apartment buildings. Lisa is also the host of The Level Up REI podcast
Her mission is to provide opportunities particularly to Caribbean Investors living in the Caribbean or in the US to invest passively in US Real Estate to build long term wealth and financial freedom.
Key Point Summary
In this episode of the BYOB Podcast, our guest is Lisa Hylton, a real estate investor, syndicator, and CPA with approximately 15 years of experience in the financial services industry. She has significant experience with hedge funds, offshore funds, private equity funds and private equity fund-of-funds, and registered investment companies, including exposure to many accounting, operational, and reporting issues involving investment securities, swaps, and other derivative products. She’s also the host of the Level up REI podcast. Her mission is to provide opportunities to investors to invest passively in US real estate to build long-term wealth and financial freedom.
- Lisa grew up around the real estate space. Her father was a contractor who built 14 apartment units. As a child, Lisa was part of cleaning up when people left and turning those units to get them back into the market.
- Lisa’s parents did property management themselves, and as she was growing up, she didn’t understand or even value real estate. She just saw it as what her parent was doing.
- Lisa says that the universe has a funny sense of humor. She ended up leaving public accounting, which she worked for 10 years. She ended up leaving to go work for an investment manager where she was auditing funds. She now works for a fund manager.
- Lisa didn’t have any direct real estate experience, but she had private equity experience. She was always around real estate. She came back to it through her current job, and she then started thinking about house hacking, living in LA, and syndications.
- Lisa has been in commercial real estate for almost 5 years. Her first passive investment was a 600 unit apartment building in Atlanta back in 2019.
- Lisa went from trying to buy duplexes to thinking about house hacking. Then realizing what works for her and that she didn’t want to live with other people. She then moved to turnkey. She took a trip from Alabama to Detroit looking for turnkey properties. After a year, she then ran across syndications.
- Lisa would go to a lot of meetups for real estate, out-of-state real estate investing, as well as turnkey investing. She went to the real wealth network and learned about the different markets, about turnkey, and all that stuff.
- The whole idea for investors about Turnkey Properties is that they buy a property that’s ready to just open the door, and the tenant can move right in. Some turnkey providers even provide a stabilized property, fully renovated, and they’ve got a tenant in. That tenant has been in anywhere from three to six months, is paying rent, and it’s stabilized. They then will then send or sell those properties.
- Many Turnkey providers will have turnkey standards. When you buy a property just right off of Redfin, you’re gonna have to do that research. You’re going to get your inspector out and inspect it to see what you need to be doing on it, and then you can do the work.
- Lisa says that if you feel like you want to execute the BRRRR, you won’t go with a turnkey provider. You would look for your houses yourself, do all the renovation work, and get your tenant. It just really comes down to you as an investor, like your risk levels and how much time you have.
- Lisa doesn’t believe that they guarantee any cash flow. In terms of HFAC and those kinds of other things. Lisa hasn’t personally purchased any turnkey, but from the extensive work that she does under a lightly real wealth network, they have a turnkey provider network.
- Lisa has invested passively in 2019 and in 2020. She has done a total of 4 passive investments to date, which are 3 multifamily and one industrial.
- Lisa says that the first thing to do is to start with yourself, and part of that might come from you doing some exploration to start with yourself.
- When it comes to real estate, you would want to invest in real estate, but how do you want to invest in real estate? Is passively investing is right for you, given your goals? It all comes down to what your goals are or what it is that you want.
- If you want fast money, then passive investing is not the path. You might want to do wholesaling or flipping houses because that’s going to give you a big sum of cash within two to three months. In contrast, syndications are more of a long-term or more of a long-term play.
- Secondly, Lisa says that if you decide that passive investing is attractive to you, and that’s something you want to do, then the next key thing is to know your operators. You want to network to meet operators and investors for referrals, for good operators and to have a network of other investors.
- Word of mouth and talking to other investors who have invested is super important because that help you stay away from people who might not be genuine.
- Lisa created a course called Passive Investing Made Easy. And the key things are giving you an overview of how the process works? How do you find the operators? When you invest, what should you expect? And the top five benefits of investing passively in real estate syndications.
- Lisa also has a module on investing in stocks reads and apartment syndications. She did a module that actually breaks down the difference between reads versus apartment syndications. She finishes up with two modules that are deeper diving into passive investing. It gives you more information about terminology, all the different apartment terminology specifically surrounding passively investing so that people can get at least a basic framework of what they’re getting into.
- Lisa says that people could deploy $100,000 all of it in the same year. Though it’s possible to do that if you are going to be very intentional, it takes longer than people think to deploy capital, especially if you’re going to go through getting to know the operators before deploying the capital, which is super important.
- People underestimate how much time it takes to get to know people and make sure that those people’s goals and investment philosophy align with yours before handing over your money.
- Passive investing doesn’t require you to do anything. You have a job to do in the very beginning. You need to be doing due diligence on the operators you choose to send your money to, so you need to get to know people to get you referrals and understand who they are as people before you hand over money. Also, getting to know the market. Lisa says that it’s so important to get to know and doing your research about that market.
- As a passive investor, Lisa says when you are deciding whether you want to deploy capital, you should ask the operator about their communication planning.
- Different people have different communication styles. Lisa says what’s more important is that they are going to be communicating every month. They should communicate how the property’s doing and then, quarterly, getting those financials from the property.
- Lisa thinks the bigger issue is that they should be doing some kind of communication, either monthly or quarterly. It’s super important that that should be going down. Lisa also thinks that it’s super important that they should be sending out financials.
- According to Lisa, if you decide that you’re going to deploy more money into passively investing then, it’s worth your while to start being able to look at some of those trial balances and sort of see what is going on and get educated. You might not be able to pull your money out of a particular deal, but it can help you to make future decisions on whether you want to continue to invest with that particular person.
- Appreciation is driven by a lot of demographics, which is population growth, and then job growth, a lot of business growth, and other stuff.
- The C class is generally heavy on cash flow. Whereas Class A is typically lighter on cash flow but can have the appreciation after a couple years, and then Class B generally is like the Goldilocks, it usually has the combination of both, you can get not as heavily great cash flow as Class C, but not as little as Class A. And then you also can pick up appreciation when you sell the property.
- At a high level, Lisa says that most deals have an IRR. They’ll tell you that they have an IRR for around 15% or between 12% to 15%.
- You should not look for the preferred return because it’s not always something that sponsors or syndicators will put in their offerings. Lisa likes preferred returns, but she also acknowledges that they’re in their instances when preferred returns are not always ideal for the type of deal that is going on.
- Lisa says that personal development is super important to help you continue to grow your business, continue to invest, continue to build out the life that you really want for yourself, and create that with your partner and your family.
- Lisa has a gratitude journal wherein she would write 3 things she’s grateful for every day. That’s part of her personal development because it reminds her that despite what might be going on, she so much in her life that she can be grateful for.
- When Lisa looked around at her job, she saw the people who were doing these projects that helped the larger company were always getting paid and would get promoted, and get to that next level because you’re adding value and to the value that you’re adding which is helping the entire corporation.
- Lisa says that when you think about your career, your life, and your business, and if you’re building from personal development laws, magical things will happen for sure.
- It’s not always easy, but you can do it, and you keep taking the steps, even when it’s imperfect, and you keep doing it, and you get better. It just takes courage.
- The cross-section of adding value to other people’s lives while also doing work aligned with Lisa’s highest calling is what she truly enjoys doing. When she can combine those two things together, it’s magical, unstoppable, and amazing.
- Lisa says to think about ways you can add value to the lives of other people. And then think about what really lights you up, and then do the thing that gives you the cross-section of both. The moment you start adding value to other people’s lives, compensation, and other wonderful things will come into place because people will consume content, products, or services that add value to their lives.
Key Quotes:
[21:45-2:55] “When you are educated and confident about what it is that you’re doing, then you can at least make very smart decisions with your money.”
[39:35-39:50] “The more you grow, the more you’re able to then pour into others and be able to serve and add value and contribute to people at even higher and higher levels. To do that, you have to continue to grow and develop as a person.”
[41:43-41:50] “Your worth is determined by how much you give in value than how much you take in payment.”
[44:29-44:35] “It takes courage to discover, develop, and donate your genius to the world.”
Learn more about Lisa Hylton on lisahylton.com
Follow her on Social Media
Facebook: www.facebook.com/thelevelupREIpodcast
Instagram: www.instagram.com/lisahyl
Twitter: twitter.com/LisaHylton16
Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCGCl06UySL12jdstEqXjqiQ
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-hylton-0b992815