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From Tech Sales to Texas Properties: How Matt Buchalski Found Balance in Business and Life

• Ed Mathews

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Ed Mathews:

Greetings and salutations. Real Estate Undergrounders. It's Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. Thank you so much for joining us again today. If you haven't already done so, please follow the show. It helps us grow. Also, please feel free to leave a comment. That is something that it's how we discover guests and a whole bunch of other information. I read every single quote or every single comment, and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. So with me is Matthew Buchalski, and he is a multifamily investor. So, Matthew, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for your time today and that's really good to see you, my friend Good to see you as well, Ed. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

Matt Buchalski:

I'm excited.

Ed Mathews:

Absolutely so, Texas, it's a tremendous market. I want to hear about your business and actually you and I share an interesting background because we're both technology guys and we're both in real estate. So I am a former technology guy I like to say recovering and you still like to sling the software and services. So God bless.

Matt Buchalski:

That's right. The sales gene has been in my blood for almost 30 years now and, as much as I want to leave the business focus on real estate, there's just something about building sales organizations that gets me out of bed and I know we'll talk about that at some point. But technology got me to Texas, and the last 10 and a half years in Texas has been some of the most enjoyable in my life, so I'm very thankful.

Ed Mathews:

Welcome to the show, Matt. For those folks who haven't discovered you, why don't you lay out for us what you do for a living and your company and all that?

Matt Buchalski:

Yeah, so right now I am head of sales for Ownwell. I lead the team that is scaling our commercial real estate and institutional investor property tax appeal business. I've been with the company now for six and a half months. It's been an amazing ride working for such a tech-first and AI-driven hyperscale company. I am an active multifamily investor. We have assets here in North Texas. We have a concentration of assets in Arlington, just a few miles away from AT&T Stadium. We have a concentration in Richardson and Garland, and then we have a student asset that we own down in Waco, Texas, in the Baylor bubble, and we just invested in an RV storage facility in Cleburne, which is South of Fort Worth, about a year ago. So that's interesting. I'm literally surrounded by one form of commercial real estate or another for all of my waking moments of every day.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, so it's interesting that guys like you and me we go into real estate, and so I knew it drew me to it. What drew you to the asset class?

Matt Buchalski:

I used to run these fishing trips when I lived in New Jersey. We would go on these overnight canyon tuna trips and one of the guys who'd been on the trip a couple of years, he was always on his phone when he was driving. He almost crashed like a hundred times and it would scare the crap out of me. He was self-managing a 50 single family portfolio on the east end of Long Island from his cell phone. I was like bro, how do you do that? And he ran a mortgage company and on that fishing trip he explained the whole thing to me. Long story short, he got me into single family investing in early 2016.

Matt Buchalski:

I bought my second. That was in New York. This was after I lived in Texas. I bought my first one in New York, bought my second one in Texas 90 days after that and then it was like how do I do more of this? You run into this conundrum where every time you're buying $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 single family property by yourself, you need to come to the table with $50,000 to $70,000 to close, plus whatever repairs you're going to do. Back then I didn't know how to look for wholesale deals and all kinds of stuff. I was just buying stuff off the MLS and I said let me start thinking about multifamily. So eight months after that I bought my first multifamily here in Arlington and from that point on I just got really excited about value add opportunities that we'd ever done.

Matt Buchalski:

The day we acquired it, somebody got evicted, the brother-in-law of the owner, who was the property manager, moved out, we had a hoarder. It was a disaster, but if there was one deal we were going to cut our teeth on, it was that one. Yeah, and sure enough, we exited with a 300% return on that deal. And from that point on it's all about like how do you scale, how do you take the capital that you have and put it into vehicles that you can drive up the valuation on, make cash flow along the way?

Matt Buchalski:

Luckily, because of my W2, I never had to rely on any of that cash flow to pay bills and survive. So all that money just went into another bank account and then, when that bank account got big enough to buy something else, we went out and bought something else and it's just this snowball. I'm very grateful about the fact that I could say I have a great job, I have a great career, but what that has afforded me the ability to do is achieve the compound effect of real estate Up until I take my asset management fees once a year. Other than that, all of my cash flow gets reinvested and it's snowballed significantly. And it's just the classic story. Compounding is real, compounding is very real. And look, if I sold everything today just from the equity that I put in, if I didn't make a profit, I just got my equity back I probably wouldn't have to work anymore, and congratulations on that.

Ed Mathews:

People always ask me why I left, and because I get phone calls every once in a while from an old boss or something you have one of them you and I used to work with as well, and I'm not interested in going back, not because I didn't love it, because I did. I love the people, I love the. Every day was different. I loved all about that job. The thing I didn't was 150 nights a year on the road.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, and so having that time freedom has been revolutionary in my life and in my family's lives, and if you are good at it, then hats off, because it's a fun career and obviously a very lucrative career. But I saw real estate pretty early on as an escape. At that point I was probably in my mid to late forties and thought you know what? My kids are starting to be teenagers and it's time that my daughters have a dad. That's in their face. A lot Boys are going to start to come around and that's going to be a thing, totally yeah, and but that was my life choice and it's but it's amazing when done well like you have. It is something that can be run as a side business, especially when you have good partners, and also the fact is that it's a tremendous way to build retirement capital so that you live well now, but so you can live really well when it comes time to hang up the travel bag and go do something.

Matt Buchalski:

Totally, and it's funny you bring this up Like your. Timing is uncanny and this is. We didn't prep for this at all. But exactly what you just said is something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about lately, and it's time with family. Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago I was sitting on my son's little league game he's 11. And I looked over at my fiance and it was like a gorgeous night. He was all excited and they were warming up and I said where would you rather be right now?

Matt Buchalski:

For several years I was addicted to the Tim Ferris podcast long form interviews, best of the best in various categories, right. But there was something Tim always talked about, which was this concept of lifestyle design, and a good buddy of mine, vince Gethings, who had me at a speaking engagement he would be a great guest on the show, by the way. He's very much a proponent of that too. He goes to Italy for a few weeks and he brings his Starlink and works from there. It doesn't matter because he's just on call.

Matt Buchalski:

But I went through a divorce five plus years ago. At the time of that divorce, I had to make a decision Was I going to dig my heels in to be a dad that was there and present for my kids. Or was I going to go choose the 150 nights a year traveling and on the road? Right, and I chose the kids because my dad wasn't there for me when I was a kid. I will never put my kids through that too. It's tough enough on the kids. I didn't want them to go through that kind of trauma and not have a dad around. I made a choice at that point to be around for the kids all the time when I had them. There were maybe one or two exceptions a year, but when it's my possession time with the kids, I'm home and I'm home and I'm working, but I'm present, and at a certain time of the day I fold down the laptop and I go be with my kids. Yeah, and everything that's become my North star.

Matt Buchalski:

So, as I have pursued opportunities, as I have looked at the next start of my career, if I look at investment properties, that's my North star.

Matt Buchalski:

I could go be a CRO somewhere and spend 150, 180 nights a year on the road, but I don't want to give up the time with my family, seeing my kids being there for the baseball games and the tournaments and all that stuff. That's really what hits me here, and no amount of money is going to take that away. So real estate becomes the additional vehicle to that mission and it affords me the flexibility to say I don't need to go chase an extra however many hundreds of thousand dollars a year, because I have this other thing that's just brewing every day and I'm paying someone else to take care of it and I'm managing managers, which is what I do in my W2. So it's a transferable skill, right. I hold them accountable to KPIs, they report back and it just. It makes my life work and I couldn't like. Right now I think my life is probably in the best state of equilibrium that it's ever been in Wow, Congratulations.

Ed Mathews:

It's rare in my old industry your industry is that. I mean you've got road warriors and it's a hard life and, like I said, I wasn't very good at it, as you are, in terms of balancing it and so, but it's. I tell people all the time when I find out that they are just had a child or about to have a child, I tell them the exact same thing, which is it is literally the best thing you'll ever do in your life. It's really gratifying, Like yesterday, for instance, the assistant to the assistant coach at my daughter's high school and I get to watch her and her teammates play softball at a pretty high level and it's that's my happy place. I love you know that. Or if my daughter, who's down at Temple in Philly, needs a dinner out because she's been eating ramen for the last eight weeks, me shooting down there for her to go look at a property is no problem and we go to a nice Italian restaurant and she has fun and I get to look at her smiling face for a couple hours.

Matt Buchalski:

Exactly, and I think there's a lot of folks out there that are striving towards the full-blown version of financial freedom, and I think that's a good end goal. Investing in real estate, if done the right way, gives you that cushion right, so that you're not necessarily worried about making every meeting. You can afford that little bit of latitude along the way Right. It doesn't necessarily need to be from zero to a hundred 60, 70, 80% of the way there and it's very flexible and accommodating as well.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, and I'm sure your limited partners also appreciate that, because the folks that we work with here, they're always asked why can't I do this? Well, you can't and I'll gladly show you how. But then they realize, wow, it's actually a lot of work. I'd rather invest with an operator that you know, they know and trust, as opposed to spending the hours that guys like you and me spend either managing the managers or managing the properties directly are managing the properties directly, but it's an interesting blend of being deliberate with your time, right, yeah, so tell me about your buy box these days. What does it look like?

Matt Buchalski:

Yeah, so we've definitely shifted it over the last couple of years. Right now I'd say it's 80s product or newer, 70 to 150 doors. We would prefer to stay in the areas where we have concentrations of other assets, just from an economies of scale perspective, but we're also open to other cities around the Metroplex. I think the biggest thing for us is my partners and I. We're all family guys, so we invest in neighborhoods where we don't mind taking the kids on a Saturday afternoon. If we need to check on something, that rules out certain areas and maybe those are for other people but not for us.

Matt Buchalski:

We started out investing in more heavy value-added properties. We acquired 34 units in 2021 and we put almost a million dollars CapEx into those two deals right next door to each other. Right? So 30 grand a door. We wouldn't even look at that deal now. Just, the market has become so different that we're looking for probably rent upside and maybe a little bit of occupancy and more of an operational upside than a heavy value add, because right now it's taking longer to fill up vacant units. Rent growth just isn't there, so we'd rather walk into something that's probably a little closer to the finish line rather than completely downfield from it.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, and construction costs are still super expensive these days.

Matt Buchalski:

The tariff situation is certainly impacting lumber costs and other material costs and so yeah, I think the tariffs on top of what we've just gone through are inflation Again not a political thing, but just puts icing on the world kind of cake. We were buying two and a half ton HVACs in 21, 22 for 3,500 bucks a piece install. Those same HVACs now are 47, 4,800, or were a few months ago. I don't know how much they're going to be now.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, probably another 10 to Exactly Depending on where they're built. Okay, and the other thing I'm really interested in is OwnWell, so tell me about that business.

Matt Buchalski:

So I get excited every time I talk about the company. Five-year-old company started in California, moved to Austin, called Dan Pace. Our CEO worked in a billionaire family office and was completely immersed by how the rich were able to find ways to save on taxes. He linked up with Joseph, our CTO, who's a PhD in computer science. They said how do we make this scalable? Do it for hundreds of thousands or millions of people and do it in such a way where we differentiate ourselves? So they've built the tech-first AI-driven tax appeal platform.

Matt Buchalski:

The company's grown like a weed over the last couple of years. We're tracking extremely nicely for 2025. Already. We did 350,000 appeals last year in seven states, mostly in Texas, and we're gearing up to do somewhere between 800,000 and a million appeals this year. Lots of automation, the most amazing technology, infrastructure and machine learning capabilities I've seen of any tech companies I've even worked at or sold product for, and the company brought me on to scale out the commercial real estate business. So I get to talk to commercial owners every day talking about their 2024 year in review, what we could do to save them money on their property taxes in 2025. And I just love being part of this community and scaling businesses. It's what I've done for the last 20 years, and the fact that they get to do it inside an industry that I'm super passionate with and connected to is very fulfilling to me, all the better.

Ed Mathews:

Why don't you tell us a little bit about the interesting thing that I find a lot of early stage new-ish investors is when they go to buy something, their underwriting forgets that property taxes will absolutely go up on the next assessment because you're buying it at a premium right. Even if it's not a premium to the market, it's a premium over what it was assessed at a year or two, three years ago, and I know in Texas in particular, that's been a very big challenge. So why don't you tell us a little bit about?

Matt Buchalski:

that, yeah, you're absolutely right. When I underwrite a deal and I underwrite all the deals that our teams invest in two or three years ago I would know that Tarrant County is averaging 88 or 90% of the purchase price times the mills rate for the taxes In 2023, that entire deck shuffled, and almost every county in Texas, at least the ones that we invested in, went up to 100% of the purchase price year one. But when you start to dig into tax code, you can find ways to mitigate that. Assets under $5 million, you may have a circuit breaker be able to apply where your tax growth gets capped. So if your purchase price is more than 20% of the last assessment, your tax growth would be capped at 20% year over year. And so it's important to really understand the nuances because, as your single biggest expense on the T-12, if you can get a 5% or 10% fluctuation in property taxes and you understand how to do it and how to forecast on it, that could mean the difference between you walking away from a 90% deal or doing the 100% deal, and so there's a lot of nuances with it.

Matt Buchalski:

From a county perspective, and prior to joining Ownwell, I worked with one of the large brand name firms and what I found was, after doing some analysis, is there was a lot of, there was a lot of kind of median or average taking into account and any sort of deviation there based on the freshness and the accuracy of the data would make a material difference. And I think that's what own well does, really interesting and really well and at scale. So, like you just, tax assessments in Texas came out a week ago. We've already analyzed three plus million properties across eight or nine counties to understand what happened with assessments last year. I don't think there's any other company that can keep pace with that, and that hence is the AI component.

Matt Buchalski:

I assume yeah the machine learning and the AI component, the databases and the access to data that we've built is unreal, and I could go to one of our analysts right now and ask him or her a question about assessments year over year, which counties are seeing the most growth, so on and so forth, and within 10 minutes I'd have the answer to that and we'd be able to make business decisions for the company and our customers on how they're able to forecast their taxes for this year.

Ed Mathews:

Explains why you've tripled the size of your client base, or at least your transaction base, over the last year. Exactly, it's a huge need, right? You look at expenses and the two lines that are the most expensive are your property taxes and probably your insurance, right, right, we've felt the sting of this ourselves.

Matt Buchalski:

When you're in a market cycle like we're in and your number one and number two biggest expenses are completely uncontrollable, going through the roof, and then you have flattening rent growth or, in some cases, even declining rent growth because you have tons of new supply coming in, you have to go into defensive mode. Every choice you make and every decision that you make and every action you take has to be in the best interest of growing your NOI. And I was just talking to a high-ranking executive, one of the big mastermind groups, down here a couple of weeks ago and he's changing everything All of his utility providers, new trash company, new property management team because the market's just demanding change right now and what worked two years ago may not be working now. I think you were seeing this at the owner level or syndicator level the difference between marketers and operators but we're also seeing this even at the property management company level.

Matt Buchalski:

Two years ago, when everybody had COVID cash throwing around and everybody could afford the extra two, three $400 a month rent increases, in some cases it didn't matter because there was so much demand. But now the purse strings are tightening and the economy's in a different place. Right, you can't count on that kind of leasing velocity, so you got to take other actions and the amount of change and the amount of innovation, I think that this part of the market cycle is going to expose and encourage. I think it's going to change the business going forward.

Ed Mathews:

I couldn't agree more. It's creating a discipline that's required. I come from the procurement world, so my brain is wired to source everything every year anyway. But I find that a lot our peers don't, and for the exact reason you were just saying is that things were good. So let's ride the wave. And now that wave is coming to shore and gets expensive quick, exactly All right. So let's get into the final five. I'm always interested in seeing how your brain works. Let's talk about purpose first. We talked about it in the early stages of this conversation, but I'd like you to drill down even further in terms of what gets you out of bed on Monday mornings, I think at a life level my purpose is to make everything and everyone I touch into a better version of themselves through interacting with me.

Matt Buchalski:

How can I raise and nurture my kids and expose them to things so that when they grow up they can have a better life than I did, right? How can I do that with my fiance? And how do we keep each other in check? What's the impact that I can make on developing and coaching my team so that they are better today than they were yesterday and they'll be better again tomorrow? And when they look back on our time together they can say those years that we spent together in the trenches were some of the most transformative, empowering in their life. And then the companies that I have been privileged to work at. How can I bring a little bit of Matt Buchowski and either from an energy or motivation or philosophical strategy, sales execution perspectives I love? What gets me out of bed is knowing that I've had an opportunity to put a thumbprint on the things around me and my sphere of influence, and that they're better because of it. Awesome.

Ed Mathews:

And the thing that I'm always interested in is I love hearing about how you got your start and the mentors that you've been blessed with over the years, and so I'm curious what was the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you?

Matt Buchalski:

There's been so much in my career and some of it has been very well-timed, but I'll tell you I think some of the most disciplined things that I've learned in my life that I still think about today and I'm thinking about a specific comment right now I worked in a butcher shop in New Rochelle, new York, when I was a teenager and I probably shouldn't have been working there because back in the day they were like working papers and you were supposed to be around sharp things when you were working as a 15-year-old. But he was always very concerned about my safety. I loved this guy. He was a father figure to me and he used to say all the time first right, then quick. Don't worry about doing things fast until you know how to do them right.

Matt Buchalski:

And I've seen this time and time again in sales, especially the last six or seven years, as you have these kind of sales automation platforms growing like weeds inside of sales organizations where you think you can just put a contact into this perfect email cadence and it's going to do all the work for you, but if you're not having the right inputs up front, you're just doing a bunch of bad stuff. I wish everybody just thought about this concept of first then quick Figure out how to do it the best that you can and then figure out how to scale it the best that you can and then figure out how to scale it and doing it the right way. And I think if we all thought about that and did it on a regular basis, we'd be better for it, without a doubt, especially in this industry.

Ed Mathews:

right, that's right. So, speaking of doing the opposite of that advice going fast, you tend to make mistakes. I fundamentally believe that mistakes are a good thing and that's where you learn. I think you learn a lot more from stubbing your toe than the successes over the course of a lifetime. I'm curious about a mistake that you've made that had a lot of influence on you, and how did you recover? How'd you rethink it?

Matt Buchalski:

When I first moved to Texas. It really exposed a lot of things in my marriage at the time and put a lot of pressure on us and created some addiction problems in my home. For a long time I thought that moving to Texas from New York was the worst mistake I ever made and ultimately led to a divorce from my ex-wife. Those are some very dark years and ultimately led a divorce from my ex-wife. Those are some very dark years and I always questioned whether move A was the right move and if I had put my family in jeopardy for the career opportunity that I came down to Texas to pursue. But you know what? The night is always darkest before the dawn and what I learned going through that is that I had not only the emotional depth to overcome those challenges and the emotional strength to be the one to make the move and dissolve the marriage, and determination to keep my family in check and my kids and I together. But, man, it's been a frigging great ride since right, I've fallen in love and getting married to my fiance here in three months, two months.

Matt Buchalski:

Whenever everybody hears this, my kids are striving, my businesses are striving. You may think you've made a mistake and sometimes we make terrible mistakes that we can't come back from. I'm lucky to say I don't think I've had to go through any of that before, but sometimes, when you think you've made a mistake, it's actually a test to see if you have the endurance to overcome it, and so my encouragement would be when you think you've made a mistake, don't give up. Find ways to course correct, find the hair that was on that mistake and just cut the hair off and move on.

Ed Mathews:

That's good advice, and I'm glad you're on the other side of that.

Matt Buchalski:

Very much on the other side of that. You asked me how I was doing when we got on the call. People ask me how I'm doing and I say never better Every day. There's a big difference between answering that question with oh, not bad, everybody assumes that it should be bad, and when it's not bad it's good. But like I truly live my life every day with, my life is never better. My children are healthy, my fiance is healthy, my soon to be stepdaughter is healthy, I work with amazing people, business is good and I have an amazing sphere of influence, and you just got to fall back on that every day and be super grateful for it and tell everybody that you're appreciative of.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, absolutely All right. So I'm interested in how you sharpen the saw One. What's the book on your nightstand, either physically or virtually, and who are you paying attention to these days? You mentioned Tim.

Matt Buchalski:

So I'm an audible junkie. I just finished a book about raising teenage girls called Untangled, which was great, and right now I've dove into when Pride Still Mattered, which was a biography on Vince Lombardi. I'm about three chapters into that right now. I grew up in Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay. I used to go fishing in Sheepshead Bay when I was a kid Huge Italian influence. I think. I'm at the point right now where he went on one date. He went to Fordham University At the time it was an all-boys school Finally got a date and his first date ended up being his last date. He married her and stayed married to her for his entire life. Yep, so we haven't even gotten into really his coaching yet. But starting his football career I love stories. I started in New York because I'm from there and I didn't go into the book knowing that, but it's just instant relation.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, that's great. So what does success mean in your life? How do you define it?

Matt Buchalski:

Success in life comes down to when you catch somebody in the hall or you have lunch with someone after a long time and they tell you working with you or working for you was the best time in my career. That's how I know I've been successful. Again, going back to my North Star, what I said earlier not necessarily in the moment, because that never happens with leadership or very rarely happens in leadership right, Finding out that you had a thumbprint, I had a thumbprint on someone's life. That, to me, is success.

Matt Buchalski:

I have a young lady that worked for me 10 years ago when I first moved to Texas. She was six months out of college, a total newbie. She was all over the place, coming into work late, like put her shoes on as she walked in the door and, yeah, I took her under my wing and since then she's had jobs in Chicago. Back to Dallas. She now works at salesforcecom. She crushed her quota last year. She's doing amazing. She's one of the top reps in New York City and she tells me all the time she wouldn't be there if it weren't for me, Regardless of what my bank account looks like, regardless of the cars, the house, the investment properties, etc. When I have tangible proof that the passion that I have for developing people and being a true servant leader ended up making someone's life better. I know that I'm successful.

Ed Mathews:

I've really enjoyed this conversation. I've enjoyed getting to know you and I'm curious how do you spend your time when you're not in real estate world or working for OwnWell?

Matt Buchalski:

Yeah, I'm at the gym every day, religiously. If I don't get to the gym, something is terribly wrong. I think right now I'm probably 35 or 40 days in a row. I love to stay fit and it's good for me from a stress and mental clarity perspective, and outside of that I love to cook Delectable things, elegant thing. I'm trying to stay fit and be jacked and tanned for the audience, it's just man.

Matt Buchalski:

I bought a big green egg a few years ago. I absolutely love cooking with that thing. I'm on a sous vide kick right now. The sous vide machine's on the stove. Pretty much every weekend, my fiance and I will open a bottle of wine, turn some tunes on and just have our own little date night, making something in the kitchen and eating something and watching TV and just chilling out together. But those are the moments that I look to create in life.

Ed Mathews:

It's great. So, Matt, if somebody wants to reach out to you with regard to the services you provide at OwnWell or want to learn more about your real estate investing business, what's the best way to do that? So?

Matt Buchalski:

thanks, ed. You can find me on LinkedIn, matt Buchelski. I'm on LinkedIn multiple times a day, checking in and engaging with my audience and the people that I follow. Checking in and engaging with my audience and the people that I follow. You can email me on property tax related questions at matt@ ownwell. com, and if you're interested in talking multifamily real estate or investing, you can hit me up at

Ed Mathews:

Awesome, matt Puchowski. Thank you so much for your time today. It's great to see it, and continued success.

Matt Buchalski:

Thank, you, Ed. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I hope it was valuable for your audience.

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