Real Estate Underground

From Pushing Tin to 345 Units: Shawn DeMartile's Multifamily Real Estate Adventure

• Ed Mathews • Episode 125

Share episode

Send us a text

What happens when you trade a high-stress career in air traffic control for the unpredictable world of real estate investing? Sean Demartel from Takeoff Capital shares his compelling journey with us, revealing how a quest for a different lifestyle led him to multifamily real estate investing. Sean candidly recounts the bold move of teaming up with two colleagues to pool their resources—even liquidating their 401ks—to purchase their first 32-unit apartment complex. Through calculated risks and a keen eye on balancing potential losses with potential gains, Sean and his team have successfully amassed 345 multifamily units. Listen to Sean’s story of courage and determination, and gain insights into the art of assessing risk while chasing your dreams.

In this episode, we unravel the complexities of raising capital and the art of reinvesting success in the real estate market. We discuss the pivotal role of high occupancy rates and how transitioning from marketing to mathematical analysis can make or break a property deal. Sean draws from a real-life example to illustrate the hurdles of securing additional financing for renovation projects and stresses the importance of transparency and trust-building with investors. It's a reminder that success in this field isn't just about numbers; it’s also about nurturing relationships and maintaining open communication.

Discover the pivotal strategies and mentorship that have guided Sean through the real estate landscape. From setting up tenancy in common to mastering prudent underwriting practices, Sean shares invaluable lessons learned from his journey. He underscores the importance of starting on the right foot to avoid IRS scrutiny and embraces continuous learning as a habit of successful business leaders. Connect with Sean through his personal and company websites to learn more about his ventures and gain further insights into his inspiring story.

New outro for Season 4 (2024)

Additional Resources:

Ed Mathews:

Greetings and salutations. Real Estate Undergrounders. It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited about today's show and we're gonna get into it in a second. But if this show, or any show that you happen to listen to, really resonates and you get a lot out of it, we would certainly appreciate it. If you followed our show, subscribed to it, leave a comment If there's a subject that you want us to talk about, if there's a subject that you want us to talk about.

Ed Mathews:

That's the way that we understand how the audience, what the audience is looking for. We tend to look for that every week and we do our best to bring on guests that address the questions that you ask. And also, if you could, if you have friends that are looking to get into the real estate world, invite them to our show. We'd love to have them. All right, and so with that, I have Sean Demartel from Takeoff Capital. Sean, thank you so much for joining me. As I was just saying, I had the pleasure of meeting your partner, mike Tai, a few weeks ago, and so I'm grateful for your time today.

Shawn DeMartile:

Thank you so much for having me on the show, ed. I always love the opportunity. I'm a podcaster myself, so I love doing podcasts, chatting with guys like you and providing as much value as I can to the audience, so hopefully your audience has some takeaways after this one.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, I am always down for geeking out on real estate, so let's proceed. So, for those folks who haven't heard of your show, the Real Estate Takeoff, or you haven't come across your website, invest With Sean yet, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll get into it?

Shawn DeMartile:

Yeah, sure, I started in real estate about five years ago and the reason why I got started and I started my entire journey was I used to be an air traffic controller. I was an air traffic controller for 12 years, or 11 and a half years, basically and that job is as you've probably read on the news is a difficult job. It's a stressful job, you work a lot of hours and there's constantly a shortage of air traffic controllers. So, basically, to put it into perspective, my only days off were Tuesdays. On my weekends, I worked at night on Friday night in the morning, saturday morning in the morning on Sunday morning, and then the graveyard shift, going Sunday night into Monday, so I had no weekend life for years and years.

Shawn DeMartile:

While I was doing that job, I was making good money though, living here in San Diego, wanted to start investing, and about seven years ago or so, I started listening to the BiggerPockets podcast. I started just going down that deep rabbit hole, reading every book I can, every other podcast I could find, and really landing on the fact that if I wanted to scale and I wanted to reach my goals of being able to quit my job as quickly as possible, multifamily made the most sense to me. I was looking for projects on my own, looking for a duplex to a fourplex, and then I had two business partners or two buddies at the time that also worked in air traffic control, and we came up with the idea of you know what? Let's just combine our forces, put our money together and go into the commercial sized multifamily. Five units are greater. Let's go big right off the bat and just go for it.

Shawn DeMartile:

So we all liquidated our 401ks all three of us. We pushed out all of our savings. The other two guys sold houses that they owned in order to beef up our money and we went and bought a 32-unit apartment and that was my first ever real estate purchase. I hadn't even purchased my own home or condo yet Nothing. First piece of real estate I owned was a 32 unit just outside of Indianapolis. So that's how we got started. The rest is history and we can unpack some of the rest and where I'm at today, whatever you want to do, but today we've got 345 multifamily units and still growing. Our properties are doing great and I've been able to quit my job and reach that goal. So it's on to the next goal now.

Ed Mathews:

Congrats. So clearly you handle stress well and, given your past experience and on behalf of somebody who used to travel 150 nights a year all over the country and all over the world, hey, good job, I got home. Thanks, man. Yeah, so in terms of I admired I started off with much smaller properties and grew into the larger properties. In fact I'm making that transition now. So I admire the hell out of the fact that you had the cojones to go big right out of the box. What gave you the courage to do that?

Shawn DeMartile:

So I was looking at it a couple of ways, I think. At the end of the day I was thinking to myself. I think there was either the slow, gradual path which I could have taken, and it just would have taken longer for me to reach my goals, obviously. But the more extreme I went with how much money I was investing and the risk I was taking, the greater the likelihood of me being able to expedite the process. And I think, with everybody you have to make that goal. There's a whole spectrum on how much risk you're willing to take versus how much reward that risk might give you.

Shawn DeMartile:

And for me I had an extremely secure job and the way I was looking at it as worst case scenario. Yes, I lose all of this money. I lose my retirement savings because I was maxing out my 401k for years. I would lose this and I'd have to reset and if that happens that would suck. But this is also a job. That's a decent job that has a pension. If I were to stay 20 years, a really good pension. To me. The biggest risk was just less of a retirement if I completely quit and it didn't go well and I looked at that as this was worth the risk for me. I don't have kids, I wasn't not married, I have way less on the line than a lot of other people. I'm just going to freaking go for this man. I'm going to go all in. I'm going to learn this. It's going to be trial by fire, and it was, but for me I didn't feel like I had a lot to lose.

Ed Mathews:

To be honest, so let's talk about. I'm always interested in hearing about the successes, but here's the thing I've learned more from bumping my head than crossing the finish line hands over my head. Oh yeah, I'm curious about the what's the biggest mistake you ever made, and I'm also curious about how you fixed it and where and how did you recover?

Shawn DeMartile:

So that's a great question. I have many mistakes I've made in my career so far and I think the biggest one was and this is the first one that comes to mind and that's not being sufficiently capitalized. On that first project, we ran out of money, plain and simple. We made a lot of. Would you say again, What'd you do about it? So what we did about it was we started pounding the pavement, reaching out to private investors to basically to come in and save us and showing them that if, as long as we're able to finish our remodels, we're going to make it out okay, and we collateralized the debt. We found a private investor that let us borrow $200,000 at 6% interest, interest-only payments, which was a hell of a deal and that's really all we needed to get through the end and it did work. We ended up 3X-ing our money. We ended up finishing our renovation plan on this 32 unit doing really well our money. We ended up finishing our renovation plan on this 32 unit doing really well, coming out on the back end of it, timing the market and selling for a 3X property or equity multiple. So it ended up working out. But there were so many lessons I learned. What led to running out of money, et cetera, but that's something that moving forward has affected every deal I've done ever since.

Shawn DeMartile:

So now when I'm inspecting properties, I'm looking way deeper and doing much more of a thorough inspection and outlining all the capital needs that I need a lot more. I'm scoping sewer lines, all of them. I want to know everything I can possibly know about a property now, because these unexpected expenses can screw you. I also don't. If you're renovating a property of that size, you're asking yourself hey, if we force more of these tenants whose leases are expiring, if we force more of them out, then we can renovate units faster and get our evaluation up faster. And we were bringing our occupancy down to 80% sometimes a little bit less in order to try and quickly turn some units, and the thing is you're just burning cash while you're doing that. So I've learned the hard way. That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make more money in the end and you're going to be in the red while during that period, and it brings in more predictability and more risk or unpredictability. So I learned. Those are just some of the many lessons I learned, and I'll never make that mistake again.

Ed Mathews:

So let's talk about the vacancy rates. So, bringing it down to 80%, yeah, you're lighting a lot of money on fire at that point, right? I'm just curious about the process in terms of how you approach it now. Right, I'll go through the breakeven analysis as part of our process in due diligence. How do you decide how many of those units let's say, mathematic simplicity 100-unit building right? How do you decide how many of those units let's say, mathematic simplicity 100-unit building right? How do you go? What's your process in terms of going through? Okay, we can afford to take it down to X number of vacancies and be able to rehab those vacancies and still be okay cash-wise. What's that process for you?

Shawn DeMartile:

It's really honestly simple math now. Is this going to take us below 90% occupancy? If so, how far below? You might be able. It's really honestly simple math now. Is this going to take us below 90% occupancy? If so, how far below? You might be able to say okay, this will take us down to 88% occupancy. If we went ahead and did all five of these this month and since we're sitting flush with cash, we're still cash flowing well, and in this scenario it's still going to cash flow Okay, fine, let's go ahead and renovate those ones too.

Shawn DeMartile:

But we generally try to stay 90% or above on our occupancy for many reasons, but I think that's just a good rule of thumb Keep it above 90%. If you're going below that, you're just increasing the risk, but on today's day and age, that's a rule of thumb. You need to look at it, because you might buy a property today and if you go below 92% occupancy, then you're in the red. I don't know, with how expensive prices are, in debt. So I think you got to look at those two things. Am I going to be burning money if this renovation takes a little bit longer than I expect, or this or that? There's so many things that can happen when you're renovating a unit. I think if you follow that approach, it's going to set you up for success more than going well below that.

Ed Mathews:

I'm so glad you answered it that way. The fact is that. So I'm a marketing guy, right, so I always talk about, in the real estate investing world. We're in a marketing business until you find a deal, and then you're math business and it's just math, that's it. No emotion, there is no. There is nothing else other than I'm buying this building. Here's how it cash flows, here's the amount of capital it's going to take to bring this up, to get us to the point where we can be at 90, 95% rent of the market, top of the market. And here's how we push value in terms of force, value in terms of this property. Simple math, there's nothing else to it.

Shawn DeMartile:

Yeah, I agree.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, so that you were able to find this investor and you were able to raise this capital at a really good rate. Just out of curiosity, what year was this? So I can put this in the frame.

Shawn DeMartile:

This was 2019, 2019, I believe.

Ed Mathews:

Okay, so rates were in the normal rates were in the threes, fours-ish.

Shawn DeMartile:

Yeah, we were like the actual debt on the property was around the four-ish range I don't remember the exact, but it was a little bit over four and going back we were trying to get a line of credit and we were able to get maybe a $100,000 line of credit, but the interest rate was going to be higher and we were newbie investors. So trying to secure debt from traditional means for another $200,000 was just going to be more difficult, was a lot more difficult for us. This was our first project, literally zero experience. So you know, outside of the private investor, it was just going to be a lot worse. There's going to be some kind of short-term loan with 8% interest or 7%, I don't remember what it was.

Ed Mathews:

And that's fine. So I'm curious about, I'm more interested in the process than the actual interest rate number. So when you realize, okay, crap, we're short on money and it's a pretty big number and 200K is not nothing, right, so how'd you do it?

Shawn DeMartile:

That's a good question. I'll start with kind of the way that the people we're reaching out to. We reached out to the lender that lent us money on the property. We reached out to the bank looking for lines of credit, et cetera, and what we ended up doing was essentially showing our underwriting, showing where we're at profit and loss statement and painting the picture that look. Here's where we're at. We've renovated 16 of the 32 units. Here's the rent premiums we're getting. We're getting $250 to $400 rent premiums on the units that we've renovated.

Shawn DeMartile:

Here's the cashflow picture. Now we had some unexpected expenses with the clay piping collapsing underneath the freaking parking lot. So we had to rip up parking lot and completely replace that and that's $20,000 we had no idea about. There was a couple other expenses like that, but the proof of concept is here. This property is producing exponentially more cashflow than the day that we bought this. If we have the additional funds to now complete these another 10 renovations plus, this property is going to be cash flowing very well. It's clear. Here's the numbers. You can look at it yourself.

Shawn DeMartile:

And when we outlined that, showed them our detailed underwriting and the road to get this thing to the finish line. It painted a very clear picture that it is possible and it was just simply running out of funds to complete the business plan. It wasn't that we had bad debt on the property, it wasn't that the property didn't have a clear path to success it did. And so by explaining that, giving the story of the property and we had that in line. So, after we had not received the kind of quotes we wanted from lenders, we started going to private individuals, and the individual that ended up doing it is a retired surgeon, Somebody that has invested in property himself before, has a general understanding of how finances work, and by getting on Zoom calls and showing him why we needed the money, how we got there, the mistakes we made, but the clear path forward, it made him feel a lot more comfortable to say, okay, cool, I'll do this for you guys, 6% interest, and then you pay me back the rest of the loan at disposition.

Shawn DeMartile:

And we were able to collateralize second position on the property so that we could give more assurances that he was going to make this money. And at the end of the day, that's how we did it. We didn't have to ask too many private investors, mostly because we didn't even have that many that we knew, but we knew this person from another individual that we knew that recommended them. So that's ultimately how we ended up getting securing the financing and again, it did work.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, so it's. This is a human-based business. I hope the folks that are listening out there turns out that the way you raise money is you go and actually have conversations with other human beings, right? Yeah, absolutely Lots of them. And yeah, eventually it's lots of them, right? There was a book, and I'm trying to remember the author. Basically, the premise of the book was never eat lunch alone, but it certainly applies to our business as well. You should be talking to investors every day.

Shawn DeMartile:

Oh, and to speak on that point, it's funny you mentioned that because me and my business partner, mike, every meeting week when we meet for a Monday meeting, we say, okay, who did you meet with last week? Who in the industry or which investor did you meet with last week? You have to do it at least once a week and I have set aside a fund money every single month, part of my budget that I'm getting together with investors. Yesterday morning I had breakfast with an investor. You should be spending as much time as you can with these people because the more time you spend with them, the more you guys get to chit-chat on a personal level and the more opportunities they have to ask you questions about your business, the more comfortable they're going to be investing with you.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, and because the thing is, there's something to be said for people that know you, like you and ultimately trust you, right? The only way to do that, the only way to get to earn the right to do business with people, is to build a relationship and actually build a relationship, actually become friends, actually build trust. And that takes time. Sometimes you hit it off and it takes a week. Most of the time it takes several months and you've got to earn the right. Okay, cool, and so you're able to raise that money.

Shawn DeMartile:

And so I forgot to ask you what did you buy that 32 unit at? We bought that at just barely over a million I think it was like 1.1 million, and we sold for 3.2 million.

Ed Mathews:

He's behind my friend, nice Hats off, thanks, okay. So then, what'd you do with that money? So you triple your money for you and your investors. What do you do with it?

Shawn DeMartile:

After that rolled it into my next investment. So we after that it's a long story, but it was a combination of deploying some of that money into some short-term rentals because I have a short-term rental portfolio as well and then some of that money went into my next deals. We did our first syndication. After that we got a mentor after that deal and then the two subsequent deals we did after that was 145 unit and 150 unit, both with just a couple months apart, and I deployed my capital into my own deals. I like to invest in every single one of my deals alongside my investors, so most of the money went towards that and growing the business, and since then I just continuously recoup that money and keep stacking it. That principle hasn't been touched and has been reinvested every single time.

Ed Mathews:

Keep stacking it. That principle hasn't been touched and has been reinvested every single time, smart. And so when you're reinvesting, are you taking capital out of one project, when you dispo or sell and paying the taxes on your gain, and then investing, or are you doing 1031 exchanges or a little bit of both? What's your process there?

Shawn DeMartile:

Great question. I haven't done a 1031 exchange, so actually we did a tenants in common and then the drop and swap. So when we sold that 32 unit we quickly did a tenants in common, sold the property and then had the opportunity to 1031 if we wanted to, and I just wasn't really able to find the right investment in the period of time that I needed to. I was trying my hardest and I wasn't able to hit that and ended up just paying the capital gains and that's how it went yeah and hey.

Ed Mathews:

The fact is, you only pay taxes on money you actually make. It's profit, right, yeah? So you said something that I want to make sure we define well Tenants in common. What'd you mean by that?

Shawn DeMartile:

Tenants in common.

Shawn DeMartile:

The best way I can explain it, since I'm not an attorney, is if you're doing a joint venture or if you're doing syndication in real estate and so you have partners, right, if you're gonna go sell a property and you guys want a 1031 into a new property, you all have to 1031 together into that next property, unless you structure it as a tenants in common.

Shawn DeMartile:

Basically, a tenants in common is just splitting the property up evenly based on your equity percentages. If you've got a 32 unit, you split it with three people, or a 30 unit, you split it with three people, or a 30 unit, you split it with three people. It's like you each own 10 units of it essentially, or you own 10%, and what that does is that now, when you go and sell it, you're just taking your profits off of your third of that property and can then do a 1031 into your own project. That's the gist of it. It's definitely more complicated, but in essence it allows you to 1031 into your own properties, into your own deal after that, instead of having everyone having to agree on the next project.

Ed Mathews:

Okay, and so one question on that, and then we're going to start to land this plane, no pun intended. So, with regard to establishing tenancy in common, is that something you do going into the property? I don't know anything about it. So that's something you do going into the property, or can you do that along the way, like prior to sale?

Shawn DeMartile:

That's a great question. I'm glad you asked because it's important. So you're supposed to do it. You can do it at any time and you're supposed to do it at the beginning of the project. The IRS is starting to catch onto this and they don't like it. So essentially, if you get caught, they audit you, you could owe taxes, they.

Shawn DeMartile:

What I called it the drop and swap is what they're trying to prevent.

Shawn DeMartile:

So let's say you did the whole business plan as a joint venture or a syndication and then a month before you sell, you try and do the paperwork with an attorney for a tenants in common and then sell. That's called a drop and swap and the IRS doesn't like that. And in fact it's literally in the paperwork I don't know if it's on, like your returns from that or your K-1 or your returns from that specific property. I'm trying to remember where it's at but there's actually a box to check that asks did you do a tenants in common within this certain period of time before closing? And if you check that box, they will likely look into it and you stand a good shot of being audited and having to pay taxes anyways, and that is actually the real reason why I didn't 1031, to be honest with you is because I was told that there's a 50-50 shot. They could look into it further and they don't like it and I didn't want to take that risk and then have that money deployed and all of a sudden be like shit.

Ed Mathews:

I owe a huge tax bill now and I do not have the money Because when they audit you for one project, they invariably want to dig a little deeper, and then a little deeper and a little deeper. And we all make our best efforts to pay taxes, but we also make our best efforts to avoid tax. I'm not saying avoid, and hopefully the CPAs that we've hired are really good at their jobs and most are Occasionally some aren't, and you get whacked for additional taxes that you weren't expecting.

Shawn DeMartile:

Yeah, exactly, it just depends on the kind of risk you're willing to take. But at the end of the day, they do not want you doing it in the middle or at the end of the project.

Ed Mathews:

So sometimes discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to going head to head with the IRS. No-transcript.

Shawn DeMartile:

So freedom for me and my family easy. The reason why is I grew up in a lower middle class family. My family has been a hardworking family and struggled with money like our entire lives, and all I think about is not only me being able to have my time and location, freedom and money freedom, but also for my family. I want to help out my family, I want to help my parents retire and that's what's driving me.

Ed Mathews:

Awesome, great answer. So the other thing that I've always come across is and you touched on it earlier is a mentorship right. And whether you do it from the beginning and you realize, hey, I'm not the smartest kid in the room, I need somebody that's done this before, or you realize it a little further into your career, invariably all of us have had those generous people, whether we've come across them or we've hired them to help us through the. I had this guy, mike Gonnerman, who I used to buy breakfast every month and he I would spend 15 minutes telling him how I was going to conquer the world and blah, blah, blah, blah about the business that I had, and he'd spend the next 45 minutes saying here are the 19 things you're screwing up and here's how to fix them. People information, and so I'm always curious about other people's mentors and the advice you've gotten. So I'm curious about best advice you ever got and who gave it to you. Personal or professional is fine.

Shawn DeMartile:

Man. There's a lot to choose from. I'm trying to think of one that I would put above all others. But some of the best advice I've gotten from my actual mentor has always been around the underwriting and how he taught me to look at properties. When he's showing me how to pull all the rent comps and how to determine where we think we're going to land and to always project more of the middle of the pack don't think that you're going to be the top dog in the market with the highest rents and how to project those exit cap rates, how to properly what kind of debt to secure all of these things.

Shawn DeMartile:

On financial modeling my properties, I learned over the past five years how important that is. There's been so many people that underwrote with exiting on really low cap rates or underwriting for securing bad debt terms, and those people are getting burned right now. And I remember even thinking going through the process man, we're turning down so many deals. Are we doing something wrong? Is he too conservative? Because all these other guys are getting a thousand units in a year and I'm sitting over here with 200. What am I doing wrong? And I remember thinking that and questioning him and then, lo and behold, we're in today's environment where people are losing giant portfolios, and it's because they didn't follow those principles, and so that's by far the best advice I've ever gotten?

Ed Mathews:

Amen. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of people that busted through their rate caps and are staring at the ceiling at 3 am going how the heck did this happen? Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I've always noticed about business owners that are successful is leaders. Almost universally are readers right, and these days, readers can mean a lot of different things. They mean a physical book can be audio books or YouTube videos or conferences, webinars, whatever. So I'm curious about how you make yourself smarter. How do you sharpen that saw? And also, from an author or creator perspective, who are you paying attention to these days?

Shawn DeMartile:

So I love, I'm constantly reading. I've read almost every real estate book. You can imagine the most recent book I've read. I also love business books. So I don't know if you've ever read the book Traction. It's an outstanding book for structuring your business, structuring your meetings Great book and I've implemented it to the T in all my businesses.

Shawn DeMartile:

So I'm constantly reading to try and make a little incremental improvements in either how my business runs, my marketing, my real estate in general, the local laws and regulations, constantly reading CoStar news and reports and reading about my local market. I think all of these things are sharpening different tools that you need in real estate. If you want to be a syndicator, you have to know a little bit about marketing. You have to know a little bit about human psychology and how you can pitch a project that's a good project to people and actually get them to make moves. These are all things I've learned over time and I'm still learning. I mean you know I haven't been in the business for 50 years or 30 years like many guys, but I'm trying to expedite that learning process and make as few mistakes as possible. So if I feel like I don't know something about a given topic, I'm reading about it, taking courses on it. I'm doing something to try and sharpen that skill.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, so it's, it's. They're the things. They're the things you think, and then they're the unknown, unknowns, and those are the hardest things. Those are your blind spots, and one of the great ways to identify those blind spots is to read the books inside and outside your specific market space, right? Gina Wickman, being the being, the traction, being an excellent example of that, right? So, eos, if you are someone who's coming into this and have you ever run a business for it? No, here's a blueprint on exactly how to run a business. Here's how you do finance, here's how you do accounting, here's how you do marketing, here's how you do sales. Here's everything right Down to the agenda of the meeting.

Ed Mathews:

As I recall from that book and I love it, it's fabulous I can't say that we've implemented it perfectly, although we should, and in fact, you're like the third or fourth person I've spoken to in the last six, eight weeks who have mentioned that book. So I think that's the universe's way of telling me I should go back and read that book again. The fact is that it's a perfect blueprint on how to run a business, especially if you're I agree, okay, cool, so great answer. Last thing is I'm always interested in success metrics in terms of personal success. So I'm curious about your metrics. Finish this sentence. For me, success means what to you?

Shawn DeMartile:

An empty calendar, and the reason why is because success means different things, different people. Right, I could say a hundred million dollars, I could say a big house in La Jolla overlooking the ocean here in San Diego, but for me, I've been grinding a long time. I grinded when I served five years in the Navy. That was a lot of work. I did years in FAA or traffic control. That's been a ton of work. Growing these businesses has been an astronomical amount of work.

Shawn DeMartile:

I feel like I'm going to be successful when my businesses are operating well, with very little input for me on a day-to-day basis, and I've been able to pull back and empty up my calendar to where I can do more things outside of business. I'm still grinding and I don't, and I've had some success with money, but it's not enough yet to where I've been able to have the team that's implementing my systems to the T. I trust them and I'm able to truly have time freedom to travel more backpack, more camp, more travel the world and my business is still operating well, and so that, to me, is the level that's success for me, and it doesn't have to be tens of millions of dollars with a Lamborghini. I care less about that and more about freedom, peace of mind, having some liquidity in case things go wrong, not stressing as much about a deal going south and pressure because I have investors. That's all stress and I don't want stress right stress kills yeah for real and yeah, that's a great answer.

Ed Mathews:

The fact is that fully agree with you is the single greatest gift I got from real estate. I spent 20 something years working for traveling, 150 nights a year working for software and service companies flying all over the country and all over the world, and best gift I ever got was not having to go on that next trip and having dinner with my two girls and my wife every night. And my wife texted me before our interview hey, I've got two bar stools that we're doing a studio over here. Can I swing by and drop them off?

Ed Mathews:

Yeah no problem. It's amazing not having a boss other than my wife, and you'll learn that someday Having a significant other, I assume single most freeing thing is to be able to go to your niece or nephew's softball game or your friend's concert or whatever, and not have to not be tethered by some boss somewhere out in the ether.

Shawn DeMartile:

Yeah, I don't want to have to say I can't because I got, I have work. Yeah, I don't want to have to say that statement. I want to always be able to say, yeah, screw it, let's go Say yes.

Ed Mathews:

It's actually one of the things that COVID taught me is I got to stop saying no to fun stuff.

Shawn DeMartile:

Right, it taught me the same thing, man.

Ed Mathews:

Right, I've really enjoyed this conversation, sean. I'm so happy for you and your success, and I wish you continued success. So let me ask you you've touched on it, but I'm going to ask anyway when you're not talking about real estate, what else do you like to do for fun?

Shawn DeMartile:

Oh man, by far it's backpacking in national parks. So like, when I say backpacking I literally mean my, a big pack on my back that has my shelter, my food. I'm going to filter water the whole nine yards. And I like to go in Yosemite or something on a trail that takes four days to do and camp next to Alpine lakes. That is by far bar none my favorite hobby. And then outside of that I just like being in nature, in general, fishing, being by the beach, lakes, in the mountains. The mountains is like where my soul is. So for me, as much as I can get in the mountains the better. Awesome.

Ed Mathews:

And if folks want to learn more about you or your podcast or anything else, what's the best way to get in touch?

Shawn DeMartile:

Two methods you can reach out. There's all kinds of ways to find my social or email or anything like that by going to Investorshawncom and Investorshawn, as Sean is spelled, S-H-A-W-N. You can also go to the company website to check out what we do and it's called takeoffcapitalcom Takeoff like a plane taken off capitalcom. And you can find me on social. I'm sure you'll see how to spell my name on this podcast and you search that and you'll find me.

Ed Mathews:

Yep, we'll link to everything, so it'll make it easy. But, sean, thank you so much. Continued good fortune and we'll keep in touch. I can't wait to see what happens next. Thanks so much, ed.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Ed Mathews - Clark St Capital

Host