Think Multifamily Podcast

This is the final installment of the 125 Tips series — and it's where Mark Kenney gets the most candid, including a live Q&A where the real questions finally get real answers. Financing requirements, loan doc red flags, why private equity is a last resort, actual deal performance across 100+ deals, and whether you should still be buying right now. In this episode you will learn: • The lender requi...

One property tax adjustment turned a 22% IRR into a negative 10%. That's what happens when you don't do your homework before you submit an offer. In Part 2 of the 125 Tips series, Mark Kenney covers market selection, deal analysis, drive-by strategy, LOI submission, contracts, and due diligence — with the real errors and real examples that expose where investors get burned. In this episode you wil...

There are things you only learn after 100-plus multifamily transactions. In Part 1 of this three-part series, Mark Kenney delivers the opening section of his live 125-tip presentation — and gets right into the lessons most people learn the hard way. Market stats, team-building mistakes, and the distressed property story that ended with a million dollars in vandalism damage. In this episode you wil...

Four questions that almost every investor eventually asks — but rarely gets answered honestly. In this Ask Mark Anything episode, Mark Kenney covers what actually happens on asset management calls, what he and Tamiel learned the hard way about dividing responsibilities, how to start telling your network what you're doing, and how to get teenagers interested in real estate without pushing them away...

What happens when your partner stops pulling their weight? Are you doing something wrong if deals keep not penciling? What do you actually risk as a KP? And if you can't close, can you lose your entire earnest money deposit? In this Ask Mark Anything episode, Mark Kenney gives direct, experience-based answers to four of the highest-stakes questions in multifamily investing. In this episode you wil...

Most investors spend weeks analyzing a deal — then hand it to a property management company they barely vetted. In this Ask Mark Anything episode, Mark Kenney tackles four of the most practical questions in apartment investing with zero fluff and real-world depth. You'll hear Mark break down: - The exact framework he uses to evaluate property management companies — including the growth metric most...

You found something in due diligence the seller never disclosed. Now what? Re-trading is one of the most misunderstood moves in multifamily investing — done right, it protects your returns; done wrong, it torches your reputation with brokers and sellers for years. In this episode, Mark and Tamiel Kenney walk through the complete framework for renegotiating a multifamily purchase price — when it's...

Two women. Both burned out on fix and flip. Both hungry to scale. They met at a multifamily conference, discovered they lived 20 minutes apart, and within a year had launched a company, a podcast, and a combined portfolio approaching 1,800 doors. In this episode, Mark and Tamiel Kenney sit down with Rachel Grun and Andrea Swick — co-founders of Good Good Investing — for an honest, energetic conver...

You've done the research. You've been to the events. You know the strategy. So why aren't you raising capital yet? In Part 2 of her Think Multifamily appearance, sales coach Keely Hubbard joins host Brent Kawakami to go deeper than tactics — into the five fear-based triggers that keep even well-prepared investors stuck on the sidelines. After 18 years in sales and a decade of coaching business own...

Everyone's selling you a system. Nobody's telling you the truth. In this episode, sales coach Keely Hubbard joins Think Multifamily's Brent Kawakami for a no-fluff breakdown of five things the capital-raising industry doesn't want to admit. After 18 years in sales, a decade of coaching, and 11 years of investor conversations, Keely knows exactly where most investors get stuck — and it's not where...

Ten episodes. Ten weeks. One topic most operators don't take seriously enough until something goes wrong. In this final installment of the Think Multifamily asset management series, Brent Kawakami wraps up with what he calls the relationship layer that sits on top of every operational decision: investor communication after the deal closes. You'll hear: - The non-responsiveness story that ended a r...

What does a 200% total return in two years actually look like from the inside? In this asset management case study, Think Multifamily's Brent Kawakami breaks down Pino — a 152-unit Class C property in Leavenworth, Kansas that closed on February 28, 2020, just weeks before the world shut down. It was a unicorn deal. But unicorns have identifiable ingredients, and this episode names every one of the...

Every value-add deal has a renovation plan. Most operators don't know enough about how to execute it. In Episode 8 of his asset management series, Think Multifamily's Brent Kawakami breaks down the full construction management picture for multifamily operators — from capital reserves and lender draw mechanics to the specific exterior and interior improvements that move the needle on rent and NOI....

A fire just took out an eight-unit building. It's midnight. Residents are displaced. You're the asset manager. What do you do? In Episode 7 of his asset management series, Think Multifamily's Brent Kawakami answers that question from experience — recording this episode while actively managing two separate fire insurance claims. He's dealt with fires, flooding, and cars into buildings more times th...

Two deals. Two different states. Two very different paths to performance. In Episode 6 of his asset management series, Think Multifamily's Brent Kawakami walks through two real Class C acquisitions from late 2020 — Aspen Heights in Fort Smith, Arkansas and The Heights in Greensboro, North Carolina — covering what he liked, what he didn't, and the asset management challenges that defined each hold....

What gets measured gets managed. And if you're not tracking the right numbers on your apartment deals, you're flying blind. In this episode, Brent Kawakami — Think Multifamily's "chief of apartment nerdery" — breaks down every KPI and metric a multifamily asset manager needs to track, organized by four reporting cadences: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. In this episode you'll learn: •  ...

Most investors close on a multifamily deal with no real plan for what happens next. Brent Kawakami has one — and in this episode, he gives it to you in full. In Part 4 of the Think Multifamily Asset Management Series, Brent covers two critical topics: what to look for in a property management agreement (PMA), and a complete administrative checklist for setting up a new acquisition from closing day...

What does it actually look like when a multifamily deal faces real headwinds? Staff turnover. A global pandemic. A prepayment penalty that hits at exactly the wrong time. In this episode, Brent Kawakami breaks from the tactical format to walk through a real deal case study: Forest Creek, a 136-unit apartment community in Atlanta, Georgia. He covers what he liked going in, what he didn't, the chall...

Your property manager will make or break your deal. So why do most investors pick one with almost no real vetting process? In Part 2 of the Think Multifamily Asset Management Series, Brent Kawakami breaks down everything you need to know about property management: how PM companies are actually structured, how to vet them before you commit, and the specific do's and don'ts of managing the people in...

You've been underwriting deals, studying markets, and building toward the day you finally close your first multifamily property. But the operators who never get their time back — the ones still grinding years later — almost always made the same mistake: they mastered the acquisition and had no plan for what came next. In this episode, Brent Kawakami — asset manager at Think Multifamily and part of...

You've been told that the right deal, the right market, or the right strategy is what separates the investors who make it from the ones who don't. But listen to enough real investor stories and a different pattern emerges: the turning point almost never happened alone. In this compilation episode, four real investors share their stories — Patrick Duffy, Lucas Miller, the Sage Investing Group, and...

You woke up one morning and the deal you've been working on for months looked completely different. Proceeds cut. Rates up. Rate caps nearly doubled. And everyone around you either panicking or pretending nothing changed. Recorded on June 20, 2022 — days after the Fed's 75 basis point hike — Mark Kenney shares exactly what happened to real deals in the Think Multifamily portfolio in a two-and-a-ha...

You pulled up your underwriting model and the numbers that made sense last month don't anymore. Rates moved. Proceeds got cut. And you're not sure what assumptions to use going forward. In this episode, Mark Kenney sits down with Brandi Shotwell — principal at Reno Capital Management and the mortgage broker he uses exclusively on Think Multifamily deals — for a real-time breakdown of what lenders...

You've got a W2, a list of people you know, and a goal to raise capital for multifamily deals. But you're already out of hours before you're out of ambition. Jeff McKee figured it out. In this recording from a private Think Multifamily group call, Jeff breaks down the exact system he built to raise over $4 million in equity for multifamily deals — while keeping his day job. A Philippines-based VA...

He built his career, hit the milestones, and earned the salary. But somewhere along the way, he realized he was showing up physically while his mind was somewhere else — and time kept moving. Ravi walked away from a global commodities role at Citi in 2019 to build something on his own terms. In this episode, he shares how he applied the same data-driven discipline that Wall Street demands to multi...