Rob Bergeron writes a free newsletter at five in the morning, five days a week, and has for years. One Saturday he sent it out saying he saw something happening between data and energy and wanted in. A reader named Mark, who had never once replied in five years, wrote back. That email became a data center company that has since shrunk the standard footprint by 92 percent.
That is the whole method. Rob publishes in public, constantly and for free, and lets the right people find him.
Rob ca...
Aug 11
41 min
Will Harvey got into real estate the way a lot of people do. He dropped out of college after a double hip surgery ended football, landed on a mortgage desk in 2015, and figured out fast how leverage worked. He bought his first house on a $30,000 salary with his dad as a co-signer, rented out two of the three bedrooms, and house hacked a deal before he knew the word for it. Then came the part nobody puts in the brochure. Three rentals in an expensive market, no money left, and the discovery th...
Aug 4
49 min
Vessi Kapoulian spent fifteen years as a commercial lender. She underwrote more than a thousand deals and managed a credit portfolio north of a billion dollars before she ever bought a building for her own account. That order matters, and it is the whole reason this conversation is different from most multifamily interviews.
Her framework has four parts, and she looks at them in a deliberate order: the operator, the market, the numbers, and last, the structure of the deal. Last. As she puts...
Jul 28
39 min
Most investors say there are no deals. Dr. Jordan Romano says you are looking in the wrong place.
Jordan is a physician in the Boston area who has spent about a decade investing in one small New Hampshire town, the town where he did his medical residency. He is hyperlocal on purpose. He uses his own capital only. And his edge is not a list, a lead source, or a dialer. It is curiosity applied to public records, specifically planning and zoning board minutes that almost nobody reads.
That i...
Jul 21
45 min
Joel Friedland calls himself the most risk-averse real estate investor in the United States, and he has the scar tissue to prove it. In 2008 he was carrying $70 million in personal guarantees across 50 buildings. Ten of them were going to have to be sold at a loss. He sat his wife down and told her, and he watched her fall back in her chair. What followed was months of depression he describes without flinching in this conversation. He came out of it with a conclusion most investors never reac...
Jul 14
52 min
Gino Barbaro is a best-selling author and co-founder of Jake & Gino, but he did not start there. He opened a restaurant with his family in 1994, lost money on his early real estate deals, and only found his footing when he partnered with Jake, set hard parameters, and built a repeatable process for buying multifamily from mom-and-pop owners. That framework carried them through the last cycle without the blowups so many operators are living through now. Today Gino has transacted more than ...
Jul 7
39 min
Robbie Crager bought his first house at 25 with no money, bad credit, and no idea what he was doing. He had just lost a corporate job and had watched Carlton Sheets on late-night television promise he could buy a house with no money down. So he found a wholesaler in the newspaper, contracted the house, and jumped in with both feet while everyone around him begged him not to. Twenty-eight years and thousands of flips later, he calls it one of the best deals he ever did.
This week on Real Est...
Jun 30
34 min
For the 200th episode of the Real Estate Underground, the conversation lands on a city near and dear to Ed's heart: Detroit. His guests are James Lloyd and Voytek Mardula of US Properties, a Toronto-based team that has spent ten years building a full turnkey operation on the ground in Michigan. The thesis is contrarian and simple. While most people wrote Detroit off, James and Voytek heard it was in the early innings of recovery, drove down to see it for themselves, and found architecturally ...
Jun 23
44 min
If you are within three feet of Ed Mathews, you are probably talking about real estate. This week the conversation is with Tom Dunkel, managing principal at Eagle Capital Investments, and it is a clinic in how to vet a deal before a dollar leaves your account.
Tom has been a full-time investor for two decades. Over that span he has raised more than $50 million in private capital from a network of investors who lean on his experience to place money into alternatives most people never see: mu...
Jun 16
40 min
Short-term rentals are supposed to be the most hands-on asset class in real estate. Tim Hubbard runs hundreds of them across the U.S. and multiple countries—without ever being on the ground.
Tim is the CEO and co-founder of Corzly, the virtual management company he built after 16 years of operating his own short-term rental portfolio from outside California, then outside the U.S. entirely. His team handles pricing, listings, guest communication, and back-end operations across Eastern Europe...
Jun 9
28 min
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