How Jason Yarusi Built a 30 Million Dollar Real Estate Investing Portfolio and Teaches His Process

In this episode of LMScast, host Chris Badgett interviews Jason Yarusi, a successful real estate investor and entrepreneur. Jason’s journey to building a $30 million real estate portfolio is a story of transformation, perseverance, and strategic action in apartment syndication. He shares his path from an unfulfilling start in life, which included working in bars and dealing with personal issues, to creating a real estate empire specializing in large apartment complexes.

He talks about how a major accident led him to realize that he needed to change, and how little changes in his habits and perspective put him on a different course. Jason describes his approach of concentrating on a single market niche apartment syndication and growing it via collaboration, procedures, and guidance from seasoned mentors.

Jason provides insightful advice on how to overcome obstacles and create a long-lasting company, emphasizing the need of planning, networking, and open communication with investors. This motivational discussion explores tenacity, self-improvement, and practical guidance for anybody hoping to succeed in life or real estate.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Jason, you’re Roosie. You can find them at Jason, you’re Roosie. com and the live 100 podcast. But first welcome to the show, Jason. Hey, Chris, it’s great to be here. I’m excited to dig into it with you. You’ve got a lot of interesting threads in your story.

One is about how you built a real estate investing empire, how you help other people do the same and your own journey of perseverance and personal development. I think there’s a lot we can learn here, but let’s start with the real estate story. I consider myself a novice real estate investor. I’ve built one spec home I’ve sold two lots.

I have a rental a second property that I rent out right now. I’ve run an Airbnb business off of my house. Which was just a travel trailer that I fenced in, in my yard at one point, but I’ve always loved real estate and been fascinated by it. But just to give some context, can you tell us about where you’re at as a real estate investor today?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah you say novice, 99 percent of the world have no real estate investment. So you are well ahead of most in the world who have gone out there and probably thought of it, but never taken action. That’s usually the biggest piece with real estate is it’s such a big blue ocean.

You can do so many different things with it. Yeah. But sometimes when there’s so much opportunity in so many different directions, you can go, it paralyzes you, right? You get stuck because you just don’t know where to start, right? So kudos for you just getting out of the gate and, myself, I, I faced some some loss like during my high school years, right?

So some friends passed away. A girlfriend was killed in a car accident, went to college. I was just lost in what I wanted to do, right? Just didn’t feel like I had much direction. I’d feel like things were crumbling around me. My dad had a small family business that was constantly struggling.

I got into college, through sports and just didn’t really have much desire. So I ended up picking business as a major. Got a finance degree and left college. Just was not really motivated. I moved into New York city, just, doing odd jobs, didn’t want to do anything with my degree.

I didn’t want to do anything with, business or finance. And so I just started working in bars and restaurants and it was, it was fun, but it wasn’t fulfilling. If that would make sense. Like you’re just doing stuff. It’s like energetic, but you’re just like, what am I doing? And around you, you have a lot of people.

Friends who are, getting jobs, right? They’re getting that full time jobs. Maybe they’re, getting married. They’re doing all these things that seem like they’re progressing in life while you’re here. Just, going living by the moment, right? And with that, that breeded, a lot of chaotic results, and I just wasn’t really happy with where I was.

It just didn’t wasn’t really satisfying for the day in and day out. It just wasn’t being productive like within my own life. And work did that for a couple of years, and then one night just angry at the world. Out of nowhere, I was riding my bike home at two or three in the morning. Got hit by a car. It threw me in the air. I got taken to the hospital and some broken bones. And some stitches in my face.

I got a pin in my wrist and I get out of the hospital and just getting back to my apartment. My mind is so focused. I need to get back to work because I need to make rent. And I had this like moment of pause. I was like, okay. This is a crazy thought and just hit by a car. I’m at a place I don’t want to be.

I don’t like the job. I don’t like where I am. And now I’m thinking about is how after this I can just get back to exactly where I don’t want to be. So I made like a pack for myself. It wasn’t this like magical transformation overnight, but I was like, okay, if I’m going to keep doing this, then I have to be okay getting these results and not complain about it.

or I need to start to change something. But the thing was, I just didn’t know what to change. So slowly and surely, I just started to do little things, right? So get up early, right? Stop drinking after work, right? Stop, doing things that weren’t really in a path that was going to be positive.

Start working out start reading, right? Just start putting myself into the moment. other areas where people positive and little by li to change. So I went from the bar to owning a bar, New York City. I opened a New York City before movi out of nowhere, Hurricane decimated, a lo

business. This small business really was targeted heavy construction jobs that did a lot with lifting homes. So his business went overnight from a couple jobs to like thousands of calls a day. And so my little brother was working for me. My now wife was working with me. We moved to New Jersey and helped dad really scale up the business.

And that was fun, but it wasn’t really again the direction I wanted to go. So we kept asking what was it? At this time, my now wife, she was pregnant with her first child. And Our day was so chaotic. It was so busy that if there was 25 hours in a day, I could have done it. So we came upon the word real estate, right?

And that, like we said earlier, was just this big blue ocean. What we did is we just started to try different formats. So we went out there, we started, flipping houses, we built houses, we started wholesaling, we started doing Airbnb’s, started doing all these different forms of real estate. It was going fine, but it was just, we weren’t, Really, we were doing good, but we weren’t doing great because it was just anywhere and everywhere.

One day came upon someone who was buying apartment communities, and they were actually buying larger apartment communities, putting together a team, putting together a process and allowing the process and the team to do the work. And that was that moment where I was like, I get it. This is how you can really scale a real estate business is that you have to go all in one sector and one part of a piece of the puzzle, put together the team, put together the process, put together the pattern, and then rinse and repeat.

So we stopped all the other real estate we were doing. We went all into learning the large apartment investing business. And back in 2017, we brought a 94 unit while living in New Jersey and Louisville, Kentucky. And that was the first of the evolution of buying apartment communities. We’ve now since brought about 3, 000.

400 3, 500 units pretty much down here in the southeast, mainly large apartment buildings, and it’s been about 320 to 340 million of real estate.

Chris Badgett: Wow, what a cool story. I have a ton of questions So when you started learning from somebody that there was like a system and a process you could put in place to scale this multi family or apartment strategy what were you learning through?

Was it through books? Was it through a mastermind, through online courses, coaching? What was it?

Jason Yarusi: So the first was a podcast, right? Came up on a podcast because and what happened was like, I heard that cause you hear, you go on podcasts and you go on a real estate podcast and one day to the next it’s tax liens, flipping wholesaling, it’s all over the place.

So I heard that. I was like, whoa. Okay. I understand that model. That model really makes sense. What I did is I put the blinders on instead of going on to the generic real estate policy. I went all in from learning podcast and learning from books and then looking for networks, right? Looking for groups that were doing this, right?

So I just found people that were doing it. I found two different people that were doing it in two different ways. One was buying it through syndication. That’s a model we use a lot where basically you’ll pull funds from investors and yourself to be able to buy a large asset. And the other We’re buying it through their, basically friends and family, like one or two partners in themselves and they were managing it themselves.

So I took both processes, I learned from both and then I put together my own process to back in. Because what I found is that lots of times we want to recreate the wheel, right? You want to redo the process and make it like your own when in fact, if you just see other people, that are doing it successfully.

You say what are they doing? And you follow that pattern. It allows you to get out of the gate to be successful in trying to re engineer this whole process for yourself.

Chris Badgett: How did you get the kind of startup capital for the first 94 unit property?

Jason Yarusi: Yeah. Great question. So had a great Suggestion by someone is that it’s always, we want to say, Hey, once I get the deal, I’ll get the money.

But once you get the deal, the hardest thing is to get the money because now you’re under pressure, right? So instead of me being able to come to you, Chris, and be like, Hey, listen I’m learning about buying apartment buildings. I’m really excited about this. The reason I can do this is because they have cashflow.

They have appreciation, depreciation. tax benefits debt pay down and you’re able to put together a team to run all this. So I don’t have to do the day to day. So we’re going off to large assets and I give you all the understanding and reasoning for you to understand the investment that you can go make a qualified decision, right?

But if I need your money today, then I have to say, Hey, are you ready to invest right now? Because I have to close in 30 days. That’s not a good feeling for you. And it puts a lot of pressure on me. So I had a very great suggestion is that I created the type of property I wanted to go after. So I knew that in Louisville, I was going to find a 75 to 125 unit apartment building.

It was going to be built between 1970 and 2000. That was really focused for the workforce housing. It was going to be in the south side of Louisville because that’s where a lot of the workforce housing was targeted And the price was going to be anywhere between three and seven million depending on the product right depending on the property And then I did my analysis and I made a one page, a very simple one page about what I was going to find.

Now I’ve set the standard of what I’m looking for. So now when I was talking to brokers and talking to bankers, I was telling specifically what I wanted to find, right? So that now helps me. It also starts setting a reticular activator in my mind in motion because now I’m looking for it, right?

Everything in front of me, that’s what I’m targeting on. Then I started to talk to my network. I started talking to basically my friends and my family. And saying, Hey, listen, I’m looking for this kind of investment. I’m going to do this for a number of reasons. Some, we just mentioned the cashflow appreciation, right?

And you can partake in this because you will be a partner in the deal. However, I’m going to do all the operations, all the management, all the generation. I’m going to sign a loan, put together the whole process, but you’re going to come in there as a passive investor. It’s going to offer these kinds of returns.

That’s the returns sector we’ve set up for it. Would you have interest if I can find this? And what that did is it didn’t put any pressure on them. And then it gave them a very simple one page to go back there and explore. But I would find that I was able to get commitment between 25, So by the time I found the 94 unit, I had already mentally raised about 1.

of yeses. right? It’s not money I took in, but I had the confidence that I had been able to raise that amount of money through people who would have interest when I found it. So when I did find that deal, I just went back to the people and within that it was almost like I think it was a day and a half. I had all the capital committed because I had already done the pre work and the pressure was no longer on them because they had already got all their questions out.

Some the one pager was sufficient, right? They got it. Someone to see a lot more detail and then we’re able to get into the weeds, but it didn’t put this over resounding pressure of, Hey, I got this deal. I need you to give me an answer right now.

Chris Badgett: So how long after that deal went through, did you realize Hey, this is definitely going to work.

Like this is all going to work out well for everybody involved.

Jason Yarusi: Pretty quickly. You take 45 to 60 days just to get like your feet under you. But what was empowering there is that I, at the same time of finding investors, I was putting together teams, right? I was finding who was gonna be my property manager, who’s going to be my insurance broker, who was going to be all the team around me.

So when I took on the deal, it wasn’t me trying to find the, like all the nuts and bolts of how the deal works. I had qualified team that just put this into the process of what they do each and every day. So I said, okay, here’s my objectives with the deal. Here’s what I want to do, here’s my renovation plan.

And here’s my marketing plan, right? Give me your feedback and your suggestions as we get into this. When we closed, we were running out of the gate, but to see it in formality of like just saying, okay, the renovation would take place. And now we’d be able to get a unit leased within two or three weeks or seven days at the new rental rates.

That’s when the proof of the pudding started coming to say, okay, the business plan is actually hitting the stride right now. What we’re anticipating is now actually being executed on the back end.

Chris Badgett: Wow. And what had to change in your mindset to pull that off? Like, going from guy who was in the accident on the bike to being a guy who could put a deal together for 94 units.

Did you break through any mental barriers or mindset shifts? I’m sure you did. Just let us know what happened.

Jason Yarusi: Almost everything. And you find when you grow up your belief system for better or worse is formulated by just your surrounding, the people that your family, your parents, like who you’re around in school just who you grew up with what. patterns within terms of people that pretty much are in your daily life or even like what you watch on TV. And not for instance, I just, there, there was a ton of scarcity in my world, right?

A ton of things of just that there’s never enough, or if someone did something that they, someone made a lot of money, they probably had to do something bad to get it right. There was all these just. Bad beliefs in my mind that we were always limited in our growth, right? limited in our opportunity.

We wouldn’t have these opportunities, even though others did, that wouldn’t be our world, right? I was constantly in a state of blame for many years, right? Just saying that where I was at was everybody else’s reason, right? My parents reasons, my school reasons, the loss I had, or, the government blame, whoever, like I would’ve pointed a finger at them until one day I just said, really with the idea of what was happening is that no matter what, it’s me, right?

I I am the one making these decisions here. So I can, and the stokes have the part of you control what you think, right? And you control how you act to what’s given to you, right? And many times we get lost in this format is that we lose control of how we’re acting to what’s coming to us, right?

Sometimes. It’s not fair, but that’s okay. It’s just life and how you show up in the moment really can set the stage of how you can continue to progress. So the more I started to put the onus on, okay, I can only control my actions, right? I can only control what I’m doing each and every day, I can’t control the goals, right?

I can’t like the 94, I couldn’t control. If and when that showed up, but I knew if I did the steps, it was, and I said, okay, each day I’m going to get up and I’m going to call brokers. I’m going to underwrite deals. I’m going to make offers, right? I knew it was going to give me one step closer when that goal was going to come.

I don’t know. And when I got out of the mold of just saying that the goal was the pinnacle moment, it was just the actions became the pinnacle moment. It’s like a lot with working out. If you run you may have the action of you want to do a goal of a marathon, but that doesn’t start with you just doing the marathon that starts with you getting up, three to five times a week and start to run three miles, five miles, in different parts, different starts, different sprints, long runs, doing your training, your actions that you control. It’s a lot with, our habits of life. We get so lost in the goal. Like right now, like we’re coming to the end of the year. Most people like you’re probably waiting for like the new year to start.

I get my new year’s resolution out of the way, but 92 percent of new year’s resolutions fail. Why is because we set this big overarching goal that we have no foundation to start. So like today I’m gonna lose 40 pounds. You haven’t worked out in a year and a half, but you’re just gonna go lose 40 pounds.

So the first weekend you work out for three and a half hours the first day and you’re like, Oh, I’m so sore. And maybe you’re like, I won’t go back. You don’t go back for nine days. And then you work out for a half hour and you just get busy again. And then it all goes off because we haven’t built the foundation to start giving us the support to be able to progress forward into the actions of what will bring us to where we want to be.

Chris Badgett: So how old were you when you got the first 94 unit deal?

Jason Yarusi: 36. All right. 37. Yeah.

Chris Badgett: And then how long has the journey been to today? How many units is it today?

Jason Yarusi: To be honest, we just closed three 55, so we’re probably about 3, 500 units right around there. So who

Chris Badgett: did you need to become to scale from 94 unit guy to 3, 500 unit guy?

Or were you, or did you, is the stuff we already talked about, it just was the natural thing that carried you through?

Jason Yarusi: No, absolutely a great question, right? Because with the 94 unit and then I did a 48 unit and a 58 unit, right? And it was myself and my wife run all these projects and then we were capped, right?

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.