Sawgrass Capital Partners: Keys to Manufactured Home Investing, Real Finds Podcast #4 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hello, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we speak with key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. In today’s episode, we’ll be talking with Rudy Curtler and Mike Samson from Sawgrass Capital Partners. On the podcast, we’ll discuss effective syndications, the keys to successful property management, and the biggest challenges of generating wealth in the manufactured home space.
Thanks for hopping on the podcast today, Rudy and Mike. They both have a unique perspective on deal syndication, affordable housing, and an overall look at what’s happening in the commercial real estate industry.
Rudy Curtler: Good to see you, Gordon.
Mike Samson: Yeah, it’s our pleasure.
Gordon Lamphere: First of all, could you give a brief introduction and a little bit about your backgrounds for the listeners?
Rudy Curtler: Sure. I’ll start and then kick it over to Mike. I’ve spent thirty-plus years in retail and the high-touch service industry. When I came out of college, I started working for Walmart. I spent about four years there and worked my way up into leadership, then pivoted and moved back to the Twin Cities to work for Best Buy, where I spent twenty-two years and met Mike. He and I formed a good friendship. The last four years I spent in executive leadership in the hair salon industry, which is unlike most other industries. I’ve been doing a side hustle in real estate since about 2007, and Mike and I partnered up in 2019. I think that’s where the meat of what we want to chat about today is centered.
Mike Samson: Similar story to Rudy. I started in retail with Best Buy, and for good, bad, or indifferent, Rudy actually trained me. So if you like what you hear today, it’s because of Rudy, and if you don’t, it’s because of Rudy too. I spent twenty years in retail, most of it with Best Buy, and a couple of years with a T-Mobile dealer. Then I jumped into the franchise industry for about the last six years, working with investors all over the US to help them narrow down what kind of franchise would be a great investment.
Back in 2019, I’ll never forget it, we were walking around the dog park and Rudy started pitching this idea of coming together as real estate investors. On a side note, when he first started in real estate, he asked me to come with him and I didn’t have the vision to say yes, and I’d been watching him create this real estate dynasty. So at the dog park, he didn’t even get the sentence out and I said, yes, I’m in, whatever you’re doing, let’s do it. We’ve been working on this side hustle since 2019.
Taking the Leap
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of our listeners probably have similar enthusiasm but are afraid of how to start. How did you start that side hustle and take that leap of faith into the real estate industry?
Rudy Curtler: We had experience from 2007 up to about 2019, so ten or twelve years of learning what was working and what wasn’t. We knew the market well, and we saw an opportunity: a fairly run-down mobile home park in a town where we’d had a lot of other rentals. We knew the market, we understood it, and we had a network there. What we had no clue about was how to syndicate something. Where do you start? Who do you pull in to do the legal paperwork? We thought we had a fairly okay vision of how to approach investors and who to approach, and we started creating a list. But the market we understood. We knew how to rent things out and we knew what the demand was, and we had a little experience running some smaller mobile home parks.
Experience is a good teacher. If nothing else, for your listeners, try to find somebody out there with operational experience. Maybe they’re running out of capital and you come in as a capital partner, or vice versa. Maybe you have something operational you can bring to the deal and they need help freeing up their time. Maybe you’re a marketing expert, a financial whiz, great at Excel spreadsheets or social media. Those are ways to get in and help somebody. Shoot, we could use somebody who’s great at social media. That’s not Mike’s and my forte.
Gordon Lamphere: I’d like to go back to that. There are a lot of folks out there with a skill, the social media maven or the individual who understands construction. How do you reach out and find a knowledgeable developer or syndicator? From my perspective, that’s one of the biggest gaps.
Mike Samson: Let me take a swing at that. The first thing I’d suggest is start with your network. You’d be shocked how many people in your network are doing real estate. My mentor is Rudy. He had a little more knowledge than I did, and we were able to leverage that. And I mean things as simple as going through your LinkedIn connections. Rudy and I literally went A through Z. I have over two thousand connections, and I think he has over two thousand. All of a sudden we had a list of not only potential investors we eventually did deals with, but also people with skills we needed to leverage, whether accounting, tax advisors, marketing, financial advisors, whatever it is.
That’s where our biggest lesson was learned. It’s not necessarily Googling the biggest professional you can get your hands on, or going to BiggerPockets and looking for the biggest names. We’ve done all of that and learned from it, but the fastest traction we got was going to our own network. You’d be stunned how many people have a side hustle, and they already know you, like you, and trust you, so they’ll be pretty excited to either do a deal with you or mentor you as you learn.
Why Mobile Home Parks
Gordon Lamphere: Great point, Mike. People would be surprised how often there’s a wealth of resources right around them. So you’ve got your resources and some experience. What propels you toward an asset class? That’s a point where people freeze up, whether they’re putting money into somebody else’s deal or putting together a deal on their own. How do you decide what a good asset class looks like?
Rudy Curtler: I’ll take a stab at it. We’d been looking for small multifamily for a number of years and had already dipped our toes into single-family residential. We found enough deals, but we saw the market continue to rise, and it became harder to make the math work. There’s a lot of competition in single-family, in small multifamily, and in multifamily in general.
Almost by accident, we stumbled onto mobile home parks. Our realtor in the town we were investing in happened to own a few mobile home parks, among other things in his portfolio, and he was getting up there in age. He was one of those guys who would never sell you anything; you’d almost have to push him to sell you something. But he said to me and my other partner at the time, if I wasn’t sixty-five years old, I’d be jumping all over this mobile home park. He was tired from some of the other things he was doing. I thought, if it’s that impressive to him, and the numbers I looked at looked really good, and I could see the vision of this park turning around, and we were struggling to get into multifamily without overpaying, let’s jump at it. That was our first mobile home park.
Once we understood the space, our philosophy became that we don’t want to own the homes in the park. As often as possible, we want to sell those homes to residents who show they have the wherewithal to pay for them and keep them up. That’s the win. Then we become land brokers, truly landlords. We rent the dirt, and we’re responsible for essentially everything at dirt level and underneath: utilities and common areas. They’re responsible for their roofs, windows, doors, toilets, carpet, all of that. In multifamily, one of the most common things I hear from owners is that they never fully understood what they own in each unit. Somebody wrecks the sheetrock or the toilet, and the owner is responsible to a large degree. You don’t have that in mobile home park investing, the way we do it. There’s tremendous upside, and the supply and demand curve is absolutely in favor of affordable housing for the rest of the future I have on this planet. Affordable housing demand is significant, and mobile home parks are the closest thing we have to solving it.
Selecting a Park
Gordon Lamphere: You touched on owning the land rather than the units, and that’s a huge gap in what people understand about becoming a landlord. We’re commercial landlords, and we don’t have a significant multifamily portfolio, but I don’t think people realize how hard it is to be a landlord day to day. Some frat bro has a party on Saturday night and clogs the toilets, and you’ve got to send a guy out at two in the morning on Sunday. Understanding how different manufactured homes are, since you’re buying a parcel rather than individual assets, can you tell us how you select that parcel in terms of location and price, and what makes a good manufactured home development for you?
Mike Samson: I see my partner pointing, so I’ll take it. We have a saying: let the math lead us in the right direction, deal in facts. You don’t want to get emotional, especially in a syndication, because the goal is a return for the investors. First, we’re looking for a property where there’s demand. We want to be in a town of about 20,000 or higher, but we stay out of the major metropolitan areas. We don’t have anything in Minneapolis or St. Paul, for example, because big real estate investors come in and bidding gets very competitive, let alone the price per pad. When you get into a town like Brookings, South Dakota, there are all kinds of small communities within thirty or forty miles that feed into it, with people who come to work there. So we look at the area first, and the kind of population we want, so we’re not bidding against big investors.
Then we want upside. We’ll look for the park in the roughest shape, with the least infill and the most upside. Say it’s a hundred-pad park with only twenty homes sitting there. That’s right in our wheelhouse. Maybe there’s a busted water line. It’s a tough park, and often that park has a tough time getting a loan, because there isn’t enough cash flow for the bank to give anybody a note on it. If other investors don’t have the cash or a syndication behind them, they can’t buy it, which keeps competition down and gets us a good price. Then we come in and, within six to eighteen months, fix all the problems and start infilling, bringing five, ten, fifteen homes in at a crack. Our goal is that within three years, maybe five tops, that park is full, stable, with rents at least at market rate, and it’s a really attractive asset for somebody to buy, so we can get our return for investors.
There’s a lot more to it, but what we’re looking for is a community of roughly 20,000 to 100,000 people, with industry around it feeding the workforce, and affordable housing in demand. We’ll look at the median home sale price too, to make sure that helps us as we sell mobile homes. Rudy, did I miss anything?
Rudy Curtler: No, you did a really nice job. Our little catchphrase internally is that we look for good uncontrollables and bad controllables. We want a city with a good job market, maybe a university, all the things Mike said. Then the bad controllables: bad management, undercapitalization, lost homes, whatever it is, because we can fix all of that. As a property owner, I can’t address the job market in a city. I can’t address whether there’s a good university or good demand. I could try, but that’s a big mountain to climb. So we keep it as simple as we can.
Mike Samson: Here’s a really good example. In Williston, North Dakota, there was a big oil boom, and affordable housing was in huge demand. Mobile home parks were going up, man camps, anything people could live in to serve that industry. We stayed away from it, because the whole market was driven by one industry. If that industry goes down, all those workers pick up and move to the next boom, and now you’ve got a half-empty or empty park. That’s not saying it’s a bad investment. It just doesn’t fit what we look for, which is multiple industries feeding a community, so we can de-risk it and be sure there’s good demand for housing.
Management Is the Bedrock
Gordon Lamphere: I can’t agree with you enough. When people make emotional decisions in the real estate game, that’s when they get burned. Rudy, you touched earlier on bringing in management or improving management systems in a park. I think all three of us agree that management is the bedrock of a successful real estate asset, almost regardless of industry. How do you go about hiring, training, and developing management protocols and teams? That’s probably the biggest gap I see between folks starting out and struggling and people who really understand their asset class.
Rudy Curtler: You’re spot on, Gordon. The people leading the property management are absolutely critical. We’ve run across a lot of investors who say they’ve never found a park manager or property manager they like, so they do it all themselves. That’s not us, because this has been a side hustle, with the intent that it becomes full time as we get to scale.
We’ve been fortunate to inherit a couple of really good park managers with underdeveloped skills. I give Mike a ton of credit. One of our park managers has essentially become a district manager for us, managing six or seven of our mobile home parks. She’s incredibly humble and eager to learn. She just didn’t know what she didn’t know. We were able to apply our operational background, Mike’s specifically in leading and developing people, to get her focused on the outcomes we’re after. The outcome is a resident in place who pays rent on time, and if they don’t, they understand the accountability and consequences. Granted, we work with people. Life happens, and we adopt a mentality of firm but fair. But if people learn they can pay rent late every month with no consequences, they’ll gravitate toward the path of least resistance. It’s human nature. Through Mike’s leadership, she’s figured out how to manage people. She does an incredible job collecting rent, keeping issues to a minimum, and communicating with us, and a big part of that is Mike’s consistent rhythm with her. We have other park managers who aren’t perfect, who don’t do everything perfectly, but that’s okay. The upside is way more important than the downside of what they don’t know, and we develop them along the way.
Mike Samson: Rudy and I have been leading people for fifteen or twenty years, and we use the exact same leadership skill set we used with store managers and department supervisors. The thing I’ll stress is get a really good business rhythm. If your park manager knows that Tuesday at 10 a.m. you’re coming on a Zoom line, and the first thing you’re going to do is go over delinquent tenants, and that’s their responsibility, they don’t want to come on that call with a big list of delinquent tenants. Without me even saying anything, just putting it on the Zoom is enough. If they can’t handle delinquent tenants, I don’t need them as a park manager. It’s cut and dry, though we don’t approach it that coldly. Their job is to make sure we’re getting paid, and Rudy and I help out if needed.
After delinquent tenants, we go to vacancies. Put the vacancy rate up on the screen. For homes we have sitting there, that’s their job, and nobody wants to come on that Zoom and see empty units. Then accounts payable. If there are repairs, they don’t want to see a bill they didn’t get approved. That’s the big thing with a remote person managing your park: you have to eliminate the surprise of a five-thousand-dollar bill showing up for a water heater. If you have that rhythm and they know it, they’ll make sure everything gets approved.
By having that rhythm and being crystal clear about what you’re going to talk about, you’ll see the results, and then you’ll have conversations about recognition, coaching, or accountability based on those outcomes. And if you buy mobile home parks the way we do, with a lot of fix-up and infrastructure work, it’s the same business rhythm for the work. If she’s working with somebody to fix a water line or remove trees: what’s the problem, who’s coming in, what’s the cost, when will it be done, send us pictures, move on. The tighter your business rhythm, the better.
The last learning, and it’s a big one for this topic: at one point we spread out our purchases across different states, and you lose the economy of scale around your park manager. Once we realized that, we said we need to center around Brookings and expand out around South Dakota. Now that one park manager can act as a district manager and manage the other park managers in place, and it really takes the burden off Rudy and me. So grow in scale so you can maximize your manpower, and when you find that good park manager, grow around them.
Raising Capital and Structuring Syndications
Gordon Lamphere: A hundred percent agreement about growing in scale. Our business model for the last hundred and forty years has been to be kings of the north half of the collar counties. We were originally kings of the south collar counties, and as our assets moved, our scale moved in coordination. If you’re operating in a world where you don’t have full scalability, you’re losing out. You’ve really become syndication experts from what I hear. How do you reach out and find capital, whether through syndication or through long- or short-term financing, particularly in this high interest rate environment?
Rudy Curtler: Great question, and it always goes back to the math. Even in a high interest rate environment, you can find deals, but it becomes even more important that your math works. You have to see a reasonable return on the investment. From a syndication standpoint, we did what we described earlier. We went through LinkedIn and asked who we know, like, and trust, and who we’d want in this space with us. We started making phone calls. We created our pitch deck. We worked with our attorney to make sure our i’s were dotted and t’s crossed and our language was buttoned up.
What we also learned is there are all kinds of ways to structure deals. What matters is whether the investors believe in the outcome and see the direction you’re taking the syndication. For your listeners: you’ll see a lot of syndicated deals offering a preferred return at some rate, or a split in cash flow, or some level of deferred payout, depending on the investment. What Mike and I learned, and didn’t know going in, is that you don’t have to structure something with a preferred return. You don’t have to carry the burden of hitting a nut every quarter. You can structure it as a function of quarterly cash flow, or with a deferred mix. We can be flexible depending on the size of the deal.
Then we started asking, is there anybody else you know? That depends on how you structure it, because there’s a difference between whether you can advertise or not. If your listeners don’t know that, make sure they talk to a qualified securities attorney and understand the difference. Depending on the syndication, we knew whether we could advertise. If we couldn’t, it came down to who we knew and had an existing relationship with. If we could, we started asking people who they knew who was interested in a passive investment and wanted to work with people like us who have an interest in, on a small scale, solving some of the affordable housing crisis. That became a really interesting niche for us, and that language resonates with people, because that’s what we’re doing.
I don’t want to get too philosophical, Gordon, but another interesting thing happening across America is that more mobile home parks get plowed under every year than get developed or redeveloped. The other side of that coin is the bad rap from some private equity firms coming in and buying parks where it’s all about the dollars and cents on a spreadsheet, not about firm but fair. Some of these investors are jacking up lot rents and forcing people out because they don’t care. That’s not our strategy. Our strategy is firm but fair, take rents up over time at a rate people can live with, and help maintain that opportunity in America for people to live in and own their property and get a leg up.
Gordon Lamphere: I can’t agree with you more. We always try to be firm and fair. Our team worked with folks intensely during the pandemic, deferring rent and creating functional payment plan structures to let small businesses stay in business when a lot of larger firms didn’t. Hats off to you, because sometimes there’s very little morality behind landlords and the rest of us get a bad rap. We all have to sleep at night, and some of us can’t be Scrooge. We have to get by on our brains, not our coldness.
Short-Term Exit or Long-Term Hold
Gordon Lamphere: On a similar note, you talked about your passive income model. One of the biggest gaps I see between investment groups is that some have a short-term exit strategy and some have a longer-term passive income strategy. What do you focus on, or do you take a little bit of both?
Mike Samson: A little bit of both, and it was actually a suggestion I was going to give, so I’m glad you came back to it. When you structure your deal, you have to understand your goal, because it attracts a different investor. Most of our investments are set up in the syndication to give us flexibility to hold between five and seven years, and we have a refi goal, which we call a liquidating event, within eighteen months of buying the asset, maybe twenty-four. That’s a personal goal between Rudy and me. We want to either have it positioned to refinance and return investors’ original capital, or have it positioned to sell. Maybe it took us ninety days to fix the infrastructure, we started infilling, kept it for a year to create a P&L, found a buyer, and sold it. That’s a liquidating event.
If anybody is doing a syndication, put the investor at the center of every decision you make. The goal is how soon you can get their money back in their hands or get them their return. If you take care of your investors, good things will happen for you. So our goal is to find the property and get a liquidating event of some kind in under two years, but always with flexibility to five or seven years in case we need more time before we sell.
That’s one type of investor. We also have at least two properties we call steady eddies. No infill needed, no infrastructure issues. The market rent was way below average, so we bought them, and they’re little cash cows. There’s no big liquidating event coming anytime soon, but they’re super dependable and de-risked, and those investors love getting their mailbox money as often as they can. We’ll probably marry those in when we sell the whole portfolio. But that’s a different investor. You have to get clear on your goal and your outcome. Folks who want less risk go for the steady eddie, and folks looking for upside go for the fix-and-flips.
Why Parks Are Disappearing
Gordon Lamphere: One last thing before the Final Four. You talked earlier about some of the hardships in the manufactured home and RV park industry, particularly parks being removed, along with structural, political, and economic issues that make it hard to develop and maintain parks. A lot of folks see RV parks and manufactured home parks and understand there’s a bit of controversy. Can you help educate our listeners on why it’s so hard to build them, particularly in places where they may be very much needed?
Rudy Curtler: What we’ve seen is a microcosm of what’s out there, but our view is this. Municipalities, cities, and planning and zoning commissions are in many cases incentivized by their tax rolls. They need enough tax revenue to sustain their expenses as a city, and they make decisions based on that, which isn’t all bad. But look at a parcel of land. We’ve got two properties that butt up against each other in Brookings, and together they make up about fifteen acres. If that fifteen acres had brand-new townhomes or condominium buildings on it, it would be worth significantly more to the city than our mobile homes sitting on it, along with the water and wastewater revenue. The upside for the city is significant. If a property is run down and the owner isn’t fixing the issues, the city may consider it more of a pain than it’s worth and work to help exit that mobile home park so the land can be sold for something of higher value and use, generating more tax revenue. It’s not a horrible thing, but it’s supply and demand.
A lot of the owners and sellers we’ve come across through our brokers and network have been doing it for a long time. They either get tired or run out of capital, and then you get caught in a bad cycle: not enough capital to fix things, so rents go down, so tax revenue goes down, so the city gets frustrated and wants things cleaned up. You can see how it snowballs. Our approach is to capitalize well up front so we can fix the issues, bring homes in if needed, and create a clean, comfortable, safe environment. The city is generally happier because it’s now a quality product in town, and people who need an affordable place to live have one. It’s cyclical. If you find a seller in that downward cycle and you can offer something to stop the spiral, that’s a win-win-win for investors, the city, and the residents. Did that hit the gist of your question?
Gordon Lamphere: It did, and it’s important for folks to understand. It’s not too different from a lot of asset classes. There’s a tremendous advantage to finding a property on a downward slope, whether from a cash crunch or a major tenant moving out. As you said, your method is about finding generally good economic environments with downwardly mobile assets. A lot of folks we’ve had on have similar models, and I think there’s a reason for it that might be related to success.
What Retail Teaches About People
Gordon Lamphere: The last thing I’d like to touch on before the Final Four is that you both have retail backgrounds. There’s something unique about a retail background, particularly in how to manage people. How has it influenced the way you look at people management? A lot of folks think real estate is just about the brick and mortar, and anybody who’s worked more than a couple of years in the industry knows that’s a bit of a myth.
Mike Samson: I see my buddy pointing at me. At the core of anybody’s success, it’s relationship driven, and then being a good communicator and crystal clear about the objectives you want to achieve. We don’t look at that as just the core employees who report to us. We probably have four, five, or six strategic partners who work with us, and then vendors. Here’s a good example. We use a portal called SyndicationPro to run all of our communication and our investor portal. I use it maybe four times a year, so it’s not second nature. When I’m setting up a syndication, I have to call this guy for tech support. He was on vacation in England and gladly helped me set it up, because of how we communicate with him and appreciate his partnership, and because we’re not a problem.
That goes back to the conversation about the city, too. Don’t be the problem child. Be the person bringing solutions, and seek out the communication. Everything we’ve been successful with in retail and in real estate boils down to how well you communicate, how well you listen, and what kind of business rhythms you put around the people supporting you.
The last thing I’ll give you: you’ve all had a boss who was emotional, and you’ve all had a boss who dealt in common sense. Early in my career, I was probably pretty emotional. If you got some of my early employees on this podcast, they’d tell you I was the most emotional leader they’d ever seen. But you learn over time, and the quicker you can take the emotion out of situations and deal in common sense, the more people won’t be afraid to come to you. When you’re dealing with park managers or vendors, the quicker they bring you the issue and you work through it, the better off you are. So my advice: it’s relationship driven, people want to do good, not bad, get a good business rhythm for communicating with strategic partners and employees, and center everything on common sense and problem solving. You’ll have a good chance of building a pretty good business. Gordon, did that help?
Gordon Lamphere: Those are wise words. A lot of our listeners are starting out or at early points in their careers or looking at investing, and as somebody who comes from a management company first, I think the biggest thing people get wrong about real estate is thinking it’s all about the brick and mortar. The brick and mortar is important. If you don’t know how to spec out a roof repair or understand an HVAC system, that matters. But people really do matter.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Moving on to our Final Four, the first question we always ask: you two really understand the manufactured home and affordable housing industry. Ten years from now, what do you think will have changed the most?
Rudy Curtler: One thing that still needs to be solved is the entire conundrum of affordable housing, and how you stop the cycle of more mobile home parks being destroyed each year than built. What I find really intriguing is 3D-printed homes. What’s lagging is municipal codes and housing codes that would allow that to accelerate. I’m optimistic there will be municipalities that get behind that technology, because you can eliminate a lot of the bottlenecks in the home-building industry with what’s available. It can be sustainable too, depending on the material. I’ve read about homes with 3D-printed walls made from recycled plastic, printed in a matter of days. There’s all kinds of potential there. I’m not a crystal ball guy, but that’s some of what I see.
Gordon Lamphere: How about you, Mike?
Mike Samson: I’d echo Rudy. We spend a lot of our spare time trying to understand the housing side, because as COVID hit and material costs went up, it put more pressure on affordable housing. A mobile home we used to buy brand new for maybe thirty or forty grand suddenly became sixty or seventy thousand, same home, over a couple of months. Where does that pressure eventually land? On the person who needs the affordable home, whether their rent increases because it costs us more to buy, or it costs them more to buy on the other end. So we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at tiny homes and trying to understand the 3D model. I think what’s going to change most in our space is different options that keep driving at the affordable home piece.
Gordon Lamphere: You’ve given a lot of advice about the future, and sometimes even better advice comes from looking to the past. If you could travel back to the start of your careers, what advice would you give a young Rudy or a young Mike?
Rudy Curtler: Two things. One, be more selective in my business partners, and seek out somebody with an opposing point of view. If your business partner sees every problem the same way you do, it becomes really hard. You need somebody who can see the same problem but think differently about the solution. Find a know, like, and trust partner, if that’s the route you choose, but one with a different point of view so you can collaborate and find better solutions. Two, figure out the syndication game sooner. The upside potential is dramatic, and there are people looking for opportunities to work with partners who communicate well and understand the business side. The runway could be even more dynamic.
Gordon Lamphere: And Mike?
Mike Samson: Loaded question. I don’t know if we have enough time for all of it, but I’ll take a swing. There are two things I’ve been thinking about a lot in terms of my kids and what I’d want them thinking about. First, I’ve learned the difference between income and wealth, and I didn’t know the difference. When I was an early district manager at Best Buy, it happened quick. I never dreamed growing up I’d make the kind of money I was making. But that was income. Then a couple of reorgs and restructures come along. I’ve been restructured five times, and at some point you’re not going to have a chair, and suddenly that income is gone and you haven’t done anything to create wealth.
That leads to my second: figure out how to make money while you sleep. When you’re in that demanding job with a good income, get side hustles going with somebody. I’m a big fan of partnering. Get as many smart people in a room as you can, with diverse backgrounds, get some side hustles rolling, and make money while you sleep. That side hustle might become your business or your dream, but what you’re really doing is protecting yourself, so when you go through those reorgs you’re not starting from scratch. You’ve created wealth and can weather the storm. The lessons I’ll share with my kids, which I learned late, are the difference between income and wealth and how to make money while you sleep.
Gordon Lamphere: Great lessons. One of the whole points of the Real Finds Podcast is to find folks who can help influence our careers and help us see the world a little differently. What real estate or business books did you read that influenced your career?
Mike Samson: I’ll take a stab at that. Rudy has referenced syndications multiple times, and so have you. In 2019, we’d never heard of a syndication. It was an idea Rudy brought to me: how do we do this using other people’s money and our network? He found a gentleman named Peter Harris. Just go on YouTube, search Peter Harris and syndication. He’s with a company called Commercial Property Advisors, and he wrote Commercial Real Estate Investing For Dummies. We watched that YouTube video probably twenty, thirty, forty times, picking it apart. In my opinion, he’s done the most for us in teaching us how to do a syndication in a way that makes sense. So Peter Harris, Commercial Property Advisors.
Rudy Curtler: I’ll go a little more old school. Mine is a book most podcasters have probably heard of, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I was fortunate to find a version called the Action Pack, and I encourage people to see if they can find it. It was impactful because it asked me questions as I went, and I chose to write my answers in the book. Man, I got into it. My wife would get frustrated with me reading in the middle of the night, writing answers down, and she’d tell me to shut the light off and go to bed. I still have my notes in it, and I refer back to it twenty years later. I bought it in the early 2000s, before I started my real estate side hustle, but it crystallized for me the power of the human mind to think about what you want and then take action steps toward those goals. Having a dream is one thing. Creating a plan with precise, specific steps is really powerful. There are all kinds of goal-setting resources out there, but that one was big for me.
Gordon Lamphere: The last question we ask: you’ve already influenced several people listening right now to take action or think about syndication. Is there a person who has influenced you, and should we have them on the podcast?
Rudy Curtler: Mine would be a partner of ours, Jason Graves. He’s a friend who lives in San Diego, California, a big thinker with a lot of hooks in the short-term rental space, and he’s been very influential in helping us think bigger about our syndication. His business is Real Estate Cash Flow. I’d connect with him.
Mike Samson: Jason would be great. He’s one of the most skilled individuals I’ve ever seen at raising capital, and he does a lot of Airbnb investing as well. And I’ll give you a swing for the fences: I just said Peter Harris was the most influential person for me. Go get Peter on here.
Gordon Lamphere: We can try reaching out to both of them. Thank you both for hopping on the podcast today. It’s a true blessing to have such a wide range of knowledge on syndication and manufactured homes. If folks want to reach out to you, where’s the best place?
Rudy Curtler: The simplest is our website, sawgrasscapitalpartners.com. People often misspell capital, so think of capital as in money, C-A-P-I-T-A-L. They can find me on LinkedIn as well. Mike?
Mike Samson: Sawgrass Capital Partners, or LinkedIn, Mike Samson. We got a lot of help along the way, and we’d love to help anybody who’s getting started in this, so feel free to reach out.
Gordon Lamphere: Awesome. Thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today, and hopefully we can have you on again in the future.
Rudy Curtler: Thank you. Have a great week.
Gordon Lamphere: If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions matter for the podcast algorithm and help us continue to get the guests our viewers want to listen to and learn from. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.