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Episode 11 – Meet the Man Who’s Bought Over 5,000 Houses

The Atlanta Real Estate Investor Episode 11

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PODCAST:

0:34 – Introduction to John Breaux and his background in real estate

5:55 – A few lessons John learned while running a real estate company overseas

13:55 – Learn how John purchased properties by only looking at real estate photos

16:31 – The difference in rent 2013 vs present day

22:23 – Rental rates in institutions and how they operate

25:04 – How are these institutions sourcing their properties?

27:42 – Learn the most exciting areas in Atlanta for investors

31:33 – What John Breaux is getting involved in present tense

32:46 –  John reveals the hottest thing in the industry today

Contact: [email protected]

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE PODCAST AUDIO:
John Breaux:
In early 1995 when he said, “I really don’t know real estate and you do, so would you like to join the firm and help me build my business?” And so I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it for a year.” A year later turned into 17 years.

Spencer Sutton:
Welcome back to another episode of the Atlanta Real Estate Investor. I am one of your hosts, Spencer Sutton, and I have as always with me, Matthew Whitaker. Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Whitaker:
Thank you. Glad to be back.

Spencer Sutton:
Yeah. And we are excited to have a guest with us. His name is John Breaux, and John, you have a great story. Very interesting story. But listen, welcome to the show. We’re excited to dive in and hear more about your Atlanta experience.

John Breaux:
Thanks guys. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit here and talk with you guys.

Matthew Whitaker:
John, I would be curious to hear your story, how you got into investing in real estate and just kind of give us the background.

John Breaux:
Okay. So you don’t want any real background, you just want my Atlanta background?

Matthew Whitaker:
No, all of the background be great.

Spencer Sutton:
Yeah. Give us everything.

John Breaux:
Because I’ve been doing this for a long time. This can take up a lot of tape.

Matthew Whitaker:
That’s fine. Let’s hear it.

John Breaux:
Originally when I got into the business… My dad was a builder and he built single family homes and multi-family down in New Orleans. And so that kind of triggered me to get into the real estate business. And when I first got in, I got into investment real estate with the company that became CBRE Richard Ellis. It used to be called Coldwell Banker Residential back in the eighties. And then it gradually over the years became CBRE Richard Ellis. And what I did with them for five years was apartment brokerage. I took care of selling apartment complexes all throughout the Gulf South. So from New Orleans to, I guess Mobile probably was the furthest that we went and had a great run for five years, but then they decided to pull out of the market. Left New Orleans behind.

John Breaux:
So I got a job with the FDIC because that was when we were in the throes of the savings and loan debacle and became an asset manager for the FDIC and then eventually the RTC when they started the RTC, the Resolution Trust Corporation. And then from there, I decided to get out of government. I was tired of governmenting and went on to working in the private sector for a large life insurance company. That lasted three years, I guess, four years until they decided they wanted to move us to Newark, New Jersey and gave us an option of either taking a nice severance package or moving to Newark. I stayed in Atlanta and I decided to take a year off and travel a little bit. Went to Europe, landed in Prague, the Czech Republic, and met another American there who had moved there with his wife, who opened the office of Arthur Andersen. I don’t know if you guys remember Arthur Andersen. They were one of the big eight accounting firms.

Matthew Whitaker:
I do. My wife actually used to work at Arthur Andersen.

John Breaux:
Oh, excellent. They got a call for people who would be interested in going to the Czech Republic to open the Arthur Anderson office there. And so since he spoke a little Czech, his parents had immigrated from Czechoslovakia when he was a baby. So he did speak some Czech. So they jumped at the chance to move to the Czech Republic. So when he was there, he started a real estate business because people needed real estate. They needed to rent apartments and find office space and that kind of stuff. Well, I met him in early 1995 and he said, “I really don’t know real estate and you do, so would you like to join the firm and help me build my business?” And so I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it for a year and help you out.” And a year later turned into 17 years.

Matthew Whitaker:
Wow. So you went over there on essentially a trip, I guess, touring Europe and all of a sudden you get a job and you stay there for 17 years?

John Breaux:
Stayed there for 17 years. We built that little real estate business from maybe five employees, which included his aunt and his cousin, to a place with two offices, one in Prague and one in Bratislava, Slovakia. We had 100 agents and employees and became the number one full service agency in Central Europe. And then we sold it and I moved back.

Spencer Sutton:
That’s quite impressive. That is quite a departure from Atlanta to the Czech Republic.

John Breaux:
Yeah. It’s a unique story. That’s why I like to include it.

Spencer Sutton:
So you sold it and then you decided to move back to Atlanta.

John Breaux:
Yeah. I moved back to Atlanta because number one, my parents were getting older and I wanted to spend more time with them. So I moved back to Atlanta and I was very fortunate to get on as an acquisition analyst for one of the big three real estate funds that was just getting into single family, residential investment. This was the end of 2012.

Spencer Sutton:
Got you. Okay.

John Breaux:
I started with them in 2013 actually, but I started looking around and talking with people. And actually the contact for this particular group came through our friend, Greg Kurzner.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah. We’ve had him on the show. He was one of our first guests on the show and obviously we go back a long way. So we love Greg.

Matthew Whitaker:
I’d be curious, before we jump into your acquisition analyst experience, I’d be curious to just know some lessons you learned in your time overseas, running that company. And then I’m also curious how it differs from the US real estate market.

John Breaux:
Oh, it’s night and day. I mean, there’s no such thing as an MLS. There’s no such thing as licensing.

Matthew Whitaker:
So it’s kind of the wild west or the wild east, I guess.

John Breaux:
Back in 1995, 1994, 1995, it was the wild wild west. It absolutely was the wild wild west. We were an American office for all intents and purposes. We set up a retail type of business where people could walk in the door. We had our agents trained. Like I had people from the National Association of Realtors come and visit. They wanted to create NARs in various countries and the Czech Republic was one of them so we met. And we did a lot of good training with our agents so that they would understand how to sell a house, how to rent office space, the ins and outs of honestly being an agent. So it was a breath of fresh air to a lot of the Americans and the British actually, who were coming and needing assistance in English. Like everything the State Department did, came through me. Every bit of business that the State Department did was through me. Anything that they rented, any housing, anything came from me. We had the unique experience working from Boeing. Boeing bought an aircraft part manufacturer in the Czech Republic and used us, me, the firm, to relocate 23 families from the US to the Czech Republic.

Matthew Whitaker:
Wow. And then I’d be curious, some lessons you learned over there that you think translate back to the US market.

John Breaux:
I don’t know. I don’t know if anything translates from over there to over here. It’s really kind of the reverse. It was more lessons that I knew here that we tried to implement over there. Yeah, I don’t know if I can tell you if there was any lessons learned over there that I could actually bring here, that would be life-changing in any form or fashion.

Matthew Whitaker:
Was there a lot of friction when you were trying to bring American real estate principles?

John Breaux:
Yes.

Matthew Whitaker:
I can imagine.

John Breaux:
Yes. They didn’t like the fact that, like for example, I did a lot of resident rep. Okay. They did not know what resident rep was. So a company like, for example, Monsanto, Monsanto was looking for office space. Okay. The country manager for Monsanto was an American. So he came to me and I was doing resident rep from Monsanto. And the other commercial agents that were there who were predominantly British at the time, didn’t know what resident rep was. And they didn’t like the fact that this guy that they didn’t know from America was coming to them and talking about resident improvements and those kinds of commercial terms that we take for granted here. But over the years that changed and they started doing resident rep.

Matthew Whitaker:
Wow. Seems like a big opportunity to take kind of a form that’s been built over here and then implement it in another country. Seems like a really big opportunity.

Matthew Whitaker:
I’d be curious what the decision to sell the business and move back to Atlanta was like? Were you just ready to get back to the United States? Ah, money. Okay.

John Breaux:
It was an opportunity. It was an opportunity. Contrary to how business has done here, over there we were bought out by a bank.

Matthew Whitaker:
Interesting.

John Breaux:
A bank over there was getting into the real estate business because they thought that it was a good add on to their mortgage business.

Matthew Whitaker:
Oh yeah. Well, that makes sense.

John Breaux:
That would never, never fly over here, but over there, for them it made sense for them to control the process from literally or figuratively, maybe cradle to grave. We can sell the house, we can mortgage the house, we can sell the house later. So it made a tremendous amount of sense to them. And we were approached by three banks, believe it or not. A local bank and the one that we eventually sold off was German. I think it was German. Yeah, if I remember correctly or Austrian.

Matthew Whitaker:
And then, so you come back here, you come back to Atlanta, what was your role as this acquisition analyst? What were you tasked with doing?

John Breaux:
Buying houses? At the time the company was based out of Tampa, Florida, and they were trying to buy houses in Atlanta from Tampa. And they ran into the problem of just not being able to do it. It was a tough project for them to do it in Atlanta. So they decided to hire somebody locally. So they hired me. I was working remotely. So I was the only person that they had at the time in Atlanta until the portfolio got to the size were critical mass dictated that they needed to have an office. So I sat alone in a regious office for three years, I think it was.

Matthew Whitaker:
Wow. You bought how many houses during that time?

John Breaux:
Over the years, I bought like 5,000 houses.

Matthew Whitaker:
Holy cow.

John Breaux:
And I left them in at the end of 2013. No, not 2013. What am I saying?

Spencer Sutton:
I was about to say that’s a short period of time.

John Breaux:
That’s when I started. I started in 2013, my apology. I left them in 2019.

Matthew Whitaker:
And so over the course of that six years, can you tell us some changes, some things you learned about buying houses? Maybe some preconceived ideas that you had that at the end you had changed your mind on.

John Breaux:
The thing that happened most is that I realized it was not me buying a house. I wasn’t buying a house. It was a commercial transaction. And I had to convey this to the people who were working with me, helping me find the houses, to source the houses. Don’t call me and tell me, well, they just hung new curtains. The seller just did such and such. I don’t care. I don’t care about that. It’s a cash flow. I’m buying an income stream. It’s a commercial transaction. And you need to convey that to the listing agents out there that I don’t want to visit the house. I don’t want a tour of the house. All I’m doing is assigning a potential rent of the house. And that’s how I’m creating the value for the fund.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah. I think the institutional buyers really early in the process frustrated a lot of the old guard real estate agents because it wasn’t in their mental model of how a transaction was supposed to take place. They just couldn’t imagine somebody buying a house without ever having seen it. But I do think over the course of the last probably 10 years since institutions have been buying houses, that real estate agents have learned the game in all of the markets, especially in Atlanta.

John Breaux:
Oh, very much. And a lot of those agents now realize, oh man, this was an easy transaction. We got the price for the seller that the seller was happy with. So my next listing guess what I’m going to do, I’m going to go approach this fund one more time. And so we’ve had a lot of listing agents that came to us right out of the box to ask us if we were interested in making an offer. And many times we did.

Spencer Sutton:
John, let me ask you. When you were saying, hey, I don’t want a tour of the house. I don’t want to look at it, you were essentially looking at pictures. You were making maybe a little bit of an assessment of any kind of repairs, anything that needed to be done. You were looking at the potential rent and then you were making your offer based on that.

John Breaux:
That’s exactly right. We would look at whatever photos that they had uploaded into MLS. And I mean, really look at them, zooming in on the photos so we could see things that maybe you would see only if you walked into the house. Right. So we would look at the pictures and we did a lot of granular analysis of where we think the rents, not where the rents are, but where the rent will be. We had a push, we call it a push rent because what came to mind was, look, we’re looking at MLS and we’re seeing what were things rented for over the last six months, last 12 months, but that’s history. Let’s not do business with history. Let’s do business looking into the future. So if we see that houses typically rented in an area, let’s call it for $1,400, we’re not going to go with the program and say, okay, we’re going to rent this house for $1,400. Let’s say, okay, we’re going to improve the house. We’re going to put $20,000 into the house. We’re going to put granite countertops in it. We’re going to put stainless steel appliances in it. What dollar figure can we get that will achieve a higher rent? You know what I mean? And then we would put it on the market for like $1,500 and get it.

Matthew Whitaker:
Did you have a rule of thumb of how much you thought you would push rent above whatever you were seeing?

John Breaux:
Yes, $25 to $50.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah.

John Breaux:
Usually, usually, unless we could see a trend. Those trends you could see in certain pockets. For example, Gwinnett was one place where we could push rents a little bit more. Surprisingly, we had places like Newnan, that early on Newnan became a destination for a lot of people. And so we could push rents a little bit further in Newnan. That has declined since, because it’s been, I guess saturated. More and more people have gone there. So it became a little bit more saturated. We were one of the first there. Cartersville was another place we got in early and did very well in Cartersville.

Matthew Whitaker:
Since you started in 2013 buying houses, what have you seen over the course of the eight years since then in terms of rents? How much have they gone up? You started kind of answering that with the previous question, but I’d just be curious, your impression of rents.

John Breaux:
They’re through the roof. I mean, they’re through the roof. Even since I left, when I left the company, I’ve noticed that they’re pushing rents even more than I did. And I was relatively conservative to be honest, but they’re testing the markets and then dialing it back as opposed to just setting a price. They’re actually setting it higher and then dialing it back within 14 days, 30 days, whatever the case may be. So rents have really escalated quite exponentially I would say.

Matthew Whitaker:
Do you think they’re doing that just because the competition in Atlanta is so stiff right now? They’re having to push rents to get their numbers, or do you think that the market will sustain that?

John Breaux:
I think the market is sustaining it at the moment and I think it’s going to happen that you’re going to see a lot of the mom and pops are going to realize what the big boys are doing and they’re going to be doing the same thing to their personal investments that they have. I hate to say it, but that’s the way of the business nowadays.

Matthew Whitaker:
It is a little more institutionalized these days. And I think mom and pops and people that are listening to our show probably need to know that, that it’s a lot more sophisticated business than it was 10 to 20 years ago. You can’t just read a book and hop in this business and compete with these big boys. And that was one of the questions I had for you. I mean, how many houses would you look at a day, John?

John Breaux:
Oh, dear Lord. At the beginning, I could underwrite 50 houses a day.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah. I think that’s an important lesson for people to learn too, is that the institutions are underwriting dozens, sometimes hundreds of houses in Atlanta a day. And so you’re going to have to learn how to compete with them by being an expert in a certain area, maybe even a better expert than the institutions can in certain areas. And so that’s kind of the lay, what I would call a busy professional, a mom and pop investor would compete these days with an institution is just knowing an area way better than an institution can.

John Breaux:
Right? And honestly, even the small investors, if the small investor is getting in to build a portfolio for himself, he should think of it as, I need to season this because one of these days I want to sell it and I want to sell it to an institutional buyer. So get in, make sure you’re doing things correctly, unless it’s just you’re setting this up so your kids can have it later. And that’s one way a lot of people look at it. They’re setting it up for the family trust, so to speak, but then other people are doing it fix and flip is more short-term vision, but you know what I’m talking about. Build up a portfolio, season it, get the best rents you can and you can easily see what the big boys are doing because they each have webpages with the coming soon rentals on them.

Matthew Whitaker:
And so let’s talk a little bit about that because we’ve talked about that as a strategy, put together a portfolio of 10 to 20 houses. At this point the institutions are desperate for houses and you can put together portfolios and sell that to them. If I was going to do something like that, what would be the best way to… What is two or three things I need to make sure I know?

John Breaux:
My phone number.

Matthew Whitaker:
And we’ll get that at the end. We’ll get that at the end, John.

John Breaux:
That’s probably important. It’s tough to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to these big guys because they themselves are really leading the pack. They’re definitely staying ahead of the curve. So you need to stay as close to their heels as possible. I’m talking about the smaller investors. But to build a portfolio that institutional in nature, you need to make sure that the houses themselves are at a level that’s going to be something acceptable to them because here’s what the big boys do, and they do this to brand new construction. They love to buy new construction, but they need new construction according to their specs.

John Breaux:
So even if they go in and buy a dozen houses from say a D.R. Horton, they’re getting great houses, but the institutional guys are going to go in, rip out all the carpet and replace it with vinyl flooring, the LVP type flooring. If there’s black appliances, they’re going to take that out and put in stainless steel or the new, what’s the new color right now? Platinum, whatever. They’re going to do all of that. If it’s laminate countertops, they’re going to remove it and put it in quartz or granite. So you need to keep these kinds of things in mind. Like I’m going to buy a house and the first time I turn it, I’m going to do X. I’m going to redo the kitchen and maybe not replace all the countertops, but put in a nice granite top. You know what I’m saying?

Matthew Whitaker:
Right. So you need to know what these institutions, how they want these houses, the finishes they want in these houses. Maybe even go tour some of them because you can go see them because they’re all for rent.

John Breaux:
They’re all for rent. They’re all on a Rently box. Almost every one of them are using Rently boxes nowadays. So yeah, go tour a house. See what they did with them and kind of mimic that as you turn your houses, and build up that portfolio. And so one day when you’ve got your dozen houses or your 20 houses, you can go to them and they’re going to take a look at it and go, wow, this really fits. We don’t have much to do to it.

Matthew Whitaker:
What’s interesting too is people are thinking about selling to institutions, as a mom and pop investor, the old guard used to think, hey, I’m not going to raise rents because I don’t want this person to leave. Right. Like the opportunity costs of this person leaving, the pain is way worse than just leaving it at a little bit below market and keeping somebody in there. That is not the way the institutions view rent. Can you talk a little bit about how they look at rental rates?

John Breaux:
You’re 100% right. In as much as they would like to retain residents and they do retain residents, they don’t have the same mindset as a mom and pop. They don’t look at it like, well, they’re such a nice couple. They’ve been in the house for three years now and I don’t want to see them relocate or dislocated, but the reality of it is for an institutional buyer, it’s cash flow, it’s income stream. As much as they love their residents and they say that on their websites. They love their residents; they love their cash flow more.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah. And I think one of the things people can learn from them is it is amazing to me the return difference because we’ve helped some institutions buy houses in the past, and just $25 a month to their return. So again, they have all these highly paid analysts that are watching the numbers and if they can bump a whole portfolio by $25…

Spencer Sutton:
It makes a big impact.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yeah, it makes a huge impact. And then they can go to the public and say we’re raising rents and our cash flow has gotten this much better and tell an awesome story, which affects their market price, their share price.

John Breaux:
Absolutely. It’s about shareholder value. And that’s how they improve shareholder value, 100%.

Matthew Whitaker:
Do institutions care about, when they’re buying houses, the after repair value, ARV?

John Breaux:
We used to factor that in, but nowadays, especially right now, they don’t even look at it. They are buying properties, and I’m talking specifically today, they’re buying properties and they are paying over list price. They’re not even looking at appraised value or market value. They have so much capital to deploy at the moment. They’re being extremely competitive with even the local buyers or one another to try to capture as many houses as possible. You’re talking about institutional buyers that were closing 50 transactions a month, and now they’re down to a dozen a month. They’ve got capital sitting on the sidelines that they either use it or they lose it. So they’re out in force.

Spencer Sutton:
So John, how are they finding their houses? Are most of these houses on market deals? These aren’t off-market deals. They’re not doing advertising. Are they buying from wholesalers? How are these institutions now sourcing properties?

John Breaux:
They have different avenues and different funds have different approaches. Most of them are pretty standardized. They use external agents to source houses for them. A lot of them have internalized that process. So they have people internal that scrape MLS every day. As a matter of fact, they get those data feeds like every 15 minutes and they scrape that data feed and make offers. They just send out offers to people. The most successful use external agents. In my experience, the external agents, they know which side their bread is buttered on and they really make an effort. A lot of the agents out there go out of their way to spend money for marketing, to drop flyers in areas that they know the funds are going to buy in. So they drop flyers, they do their own marketing. You have agents out there with billboards, “We buy houses.”

John Breaux:
They get those people who call or go to their webpage to have, hey, this is my house. And what those agents do is just turn it immediately back to the fund and say, hey, can you make me an offer? External agents, they really work hard to source good properties for them. A lot of them are through the MLS. So they do it internally. They have exterior, external rather, sourcing agents that go out and bust their butts to find properties for them. And then of course they use wholesalers and things like that. I don’t think they find a lot of success with wholesalers and flippers because there have been a lot of cases where the house just isn’t up to snuff. They get out there and they find that it’s just a little lipstick has been put on the house.

John Breaux:
And when they send out their inspectors, that inspector knows to lift every rock. They know specifically what to look for. And these are internal inspectors that go out there. It’s not an external inspector that kind of glosses through the house. You know what I mean? They do literally lift every floorboard and check to see what’s really underneath. So flippers, they’ve been successful with them, but not to the same degree as scraping MLS and getting direct from sellers contacting them. And that’s kind of a new thing. That sellers contacting them directly is kind of a new thing, but that’s starting to happen.

Matthew Whitaker:
You named some specific areas earlier in the podcast, I’d be interested to know some areas that you’re excited about in Atlanta.

John Breaux:
Oh, good question. Well, we bought in all 11 Metro counties. We circled the perimeter of Atlanta. Paulding County was one that did extremely well. Gwinnett County, early on was the go-to destination, but Gwinnett County pricing has gotten to the point where the numbers just didn’t work. The rents were not keeping pace with the value of the houses. So Gwinnett started sliding. Paulding County climbed. Coweta County climbed, Newnan being the area that we concentrated on. And then we started branching into again, Cartersville, the 75 corridor, the 85 corridor, the X in Atlanta. So we followed the corridors and we were very successful with that. But Paulding County, which is kind of in the middle of it all, north of 20 and we’re talking Dallas, Hiram and that area, became very successful.

John Breaux:
And to this day, you can still find some good deals in Paulding County. Douglas County has been very, very good to investors as well, even so far as to go out to Villa Rica. What is that? Is that Carroll County? I’m trying to think of the map, but Villa Rica was also very good. I think Dawson County, so right north of Forsyth, moving into Dawson County. I think Dawson County is probably going to be doing well, but not so far. Like if you’re familiar with Georgia 400, you go up Georgia 400, you get to that outlet center. I think that’s the cutoff. I don’t know because most, if not all of the investors only look for property that’s on public sewer. And then when you start getting out so far, you start losing that. You start finding houses that are on septic tank systems. Yeah. And that becomes a problem. Jackson County and Hall County is another place where I think you’re going to start seeing more acquisitions, but I think it’s going to be kind of spotty because of the septic tank systems.

Matthew Whitaker:
Those septic tanks’ kind of drive that. I guess that has a lot to do with population density of the area, but that was kind of the question is how far out are these funds willing to go to find houses out of the Metro?

John Breaux:
Hey, good question. You make me think because one part of me is saying they don’t want to go out too far. Like for example, Braselton, around through Forsyth County, so the border between Dawson and Forsyth County, then over to Cartersville, Bartow County, and then around through Paulding County, Villa Rica, Douglas County down to Coweta County, not Newnan and then up towards DeKalb County and then back up again. But that said, what they’re doing now is they’re starting to look for the secondary markets. The secondary markets would be something like Birmingham, Chattanooga, Greenville, South Carolina. Savannah is an area that they’re looking at now.

Matthew Whitaker:
We’ve noticed that obviously. We have an office in Birmingham, one in Chattanooga, and we’ve noticed the same things that some of the smaller institutions came over first and started buying. And now the bigger ones are starting to follow and do that in the same areas. Another area that would be on that would be Macon, Georgia; Augusta. Those areas that they’re buying.

John Breaux:
There has to be some form of critical mass.

Matthew Whitaker:
Yes.

John Breaux:
That’s the trick.

Spencer Sutton:
So John, you left in 2019, so as we wrap up, tell us what you’re doing now.

John Breaux:
Well, I’ve gotten back into doing investment sales. I’m not really a retail, open house kind of person. I’m just not wired that way. I crunch numbers. That’s what I like to do. So I’ve gotten back into working with investors and some of them are the large investors. I’ve concentrated on the smaller investors for the time being, but that’s starting to branch out now because I know that I can help those larger investors as well. I have a thing for new construction. That was one of the things I really got involved with doing bulk new construction deals. So right now I’m actively looking for new construction, what they call build to rent deals. So I’m looking for builders who have, I don’t know, 50 houses in a subdivision that they want to sell or 100 houses. Right now I’ve got two big funds, that’s what they’re specifically looking for in Georgia and Alabama. So that’s kind of taking up my time right now and bulk portfolio deals.

Matthew Whitaker:
Before we wrap up, I do want to talk about build to rent because it’s kind of the hottest thing in the industry right now. And so what are funds looking for in build to rent?

John Breaux:
Well, they look at it from two different angles. One of them is just buying, onesie, twosies, close outs in a subdivision. They’ll do those all day every day because they love the new construction. For one thing, they rent really fast. And you know as well as I do, residents love the fact that the houses are DNA free. They love the fact that they’re the first person to touch everything. So all of the funds, and even I think some small investors, they will look at those onesie, twosie deals if they work and buy those. But the thing nowadays is bulk transactions. So what they’re looking to do is find a builder who’s going to build 20, 50, 100 houses for them to their spec and what they’re really going to be gravitating to, and we’re starting to see this now, is closed subdivisions. Where the investor, the bulk investor, they want the entire subdivision as a rental. A horizontal apartment complex, basically.

Matthew Whitaker:
So they would essentially be the HOA. They would provide the landscaping. They could keep the neighborhoods up.

John Breaux:
That’s correct. That’s the thing I think we started gravitating into just recently, just like over the last six months I’m seeing and hearing more and more chatter on those build to rent situations.

Matthew Whitaker:
John, this was great. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I know a lot of people got some good information out of this. How would somebody get in touch with you if they wanted to reach out to you to ask some more questions?

John Breaux:
Just send me an email. I’m happy to answer all my emails. I’m fairly good at responding to people quickly. So if somebody wants to reach out, feel free to send me an email. I don’t know if I want to publish my phone number.

Matthew Whitaker:
Don’t worry. Would you be willing to give your email address? So if somebody wanted to…

John Breaux:
Yeah. It’s [email protected].

Matthew Whitaker:
Perfect. Well, reach out to John if you have any questions about the Atlanta Metro area. Spencer, this has been awesome.

Spencer Sutton:
Yeah, this has been great, John. Thanks again for coming on the show. I know I learned a lot. We appreciate it. And listen, everybody if you heard this episode and you want to share it, please do so. Leave us a review and leave us a five-star review. We’d love that because that’s how more people find us. So make sure you subscribe and we’ll be back with you in two weeks with a new episode. Thanks again, John.

John Breaux:
Thank you guys. I really enjoyed this. Thanks again.


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