Data Driven Real Estate Investing

Neal Bawa - Grocapitus and MultifamilyU
On Using the Right Tools to Make Good Decisions: "I said, I'm going to mine as much data as possible and try to get insights from that data."
Many investors use real estate investing as an investment vehicle in their portfolio.  Most of those investors are looking at their local real estate market and trying to find deals that can pump out the returns they want.
But the world is smaller now, and real estate investing in your backyard is no longer necessary.  You can invest hundreds of miles away and possibly turn over a stronger margin.  The way to find the best place to invest, starts with gathering data and comparing places.
Neal Bawa, known widely as the "mad scientist of multifamily," is the engineer turned real estate investor that combines his knowledge of real estate, data science, and artificial intelligence. Neal shares his unconventional journey from running a successful tech company to revolutionizing real estate investing through data-driven decisions and AI-powered tools. Neal weathered the housing crash of 2008, built a thriving syndication business and a free educational community at MultifamilyU.
Listen as Neal teaches us how to be fascinated by real estate, curious about the AI revolution, and to seek new ways to scale and automate your business.
Enjoy!
Visit Neal at: https://multifamilyu.com/
Sponsors:
Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service, phone answering for small businesses: https://callsoncall.com
Some videos have been recorded with Riverside: https://www.riverside.fm/?utm_campaign=campaign_5&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=james-kademan
 
Podcast Overview:
00:00 Bringing IV therapy to Madison
05:39 Navigating Franchise Regulations
07:47 IV therapy goes mainstream in Tokyo
12:50 Curated med spa offerings
14:44 Choosing Hydrate IV Bar for Madison
19:02 Starting with franchise questions
20:37 Building a Health-Focused Community
24:53 Benefits of Vitamin D Supplementation
27:55 Challenges with supplement patents
32:20 Functional medicine consultations at Hydrate
34:08 Patient advocacy and safe care
39:05 Frequency of sessions per week
41:33 Supplements and their credibility
47:04 Choosing the right location
48:42 Optimizing franchise location space
52:48 Hiring nurses for IV procedures
56:16 Spa services and mobile options
Podcast Transcription:
Neal Bawa [00:00:00]:
We are currently at 1% of the data center needs that we have where humanity is going through the greatest change in its existence. Greater than the invention of the wheel, greater than the invention of fire, greater than the invention of the personal computer and the Internet put together. We have never seen anything of this Type. The smartphone wasn't even 1% of the AI revolution. And we think of the smartphone as the greatest invention of our times. It's nothing compared to AI.
James [00:00:37]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found@drawincustomers.com we are locally unwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call, Extraordinary answering service, the Bold Business Book as well as Live Switch. And today we're welcoming, preparing to learn from Neil Bawa of Growcapitus. I'm told, Neil, you are the mad scientist of multifamily. Is that true?
Neal Bawa [00:01:10]:
It's a moniker I present at many conferences. So I presented at over 101 of the times when I was walking up to the stage, they were announcing and talking about me. The announcer said, the mad scientists of multifamily. And that got a nice gasp out of the audience and I was like, I like this. And so the next year I went to the conference, he introduced me as a mad scientist. And then eventually I was like, people like this concept because it helps them understand that I'm data driven. I'm very AI focused. And so it's an interesting moniker.
Neal Bawa [00:01:41]:
I don't have the dark brown hair, but I mean that's how I roll. So I let it be and eventually it became part of our story.
James [00:01:51]:
That is incredible. So tell me the story. How did you end up with the moniker of the mad scientist of multifamily? That's not something people throw randomly around.
Neal Bawa [00:02:00]:
Yeah, so look, I'm not a real estate guy, not a real estate royalty. No one in my family is in real estate. I'm a technologist. I'm from India, came here as a computer scientist. Data science is my area of interest. I'm an amateur data scientist, but my degree is in computer science and I ran a tech company from 1999 to 2013. Very successful, not a start up, you know, hundreds of employees. And we sold it in 2013.
Neal Bawa [00:02:28]:
And my interest in real estate started when the senior partner in the firm, I was a junior partner, basically said in 2003, we are not going to rent, we are going to build our own campus. And this wasn't a multifamily campus at that time. It was an office campus for a business. And, you know, we had 150 employees, and we were renting from somebody. And he didn't like that. So he, under his guidance and his expert advice, I built the first campus in 2003. We took 12 months to build it. We had no investors.
Neal Bawa [00:03:00]:
We had no bank. It was just all cash. We built it ourselves because the business was quite profitable. At the end of that process, I realized just the extraordinary, shockingly high benefits that you get when you use depreciation, Right? Cause this big campus, 27,000 square feet, and I just all of a sudden was making. Taking a lot more money home. I wasn't making more money. I was just taking a lot more money home because the depreciation of that building was phenomenal. And that got me hooked into real estate.
Neal Bawa [00:03:30]:
Because at one time, I remember after that building was done, James, I remember saying to my wife, I think real estate is the best authorized tax scam in America. Now, obviously, I didn't know depreciation back then. I didn't understand accounting. Now I understand that there's nothing scammy about it. You know, depreciation is a legitimate right. And you take it for real estate. You can also take it for other things. But for real estate, it's.
Neal Bawa [00:03:56]:
It's extremely beneficial compared to any other form of depreciation, any other business. And so I realized that I, you know, I had the big fat tax salary, and I was living in Taxifornia, so I was basically working for the man. 50% of my salary was going to state and federal. And so I said, I need to find a way around this, because I read a book by Robert Kiyosaki, and I remember the statement, it's not what you make, it's what you keep. Right? And I was like, I ain't keeping much of my salary. So I was like, okay, I need to get into real estate. So I went back to my boss and said, you know, what we did with this campus was really great. Let's do it again.
Neal Bawa [00:04:31]:
And so we built a bunch more campuses. I think four or five campuses were built and improved coming up to 2008. And so each year, what would happen is I was keeping more and more of my income because of all the depreciation that I was getting. And so I was saving and saving and saving. And so I'd ended up with, you know, pretty large amount of money by the time 2008 hit. And then when that happened, all of a sudden, property values plummeted. They went down. And so I would go to, you know, my family events and everyone would just bash real estate.
Neal Bawa [00:04:58]:
Everyone's like, this is horrible. Don't buy real estate. It's horrible, horrible. It's going to crash. You know, it's worth nothing, blah, blah, blah. And you can imagine everyone was saying that because, you know, all the television, on the tv you're just hearing bad news, bad news. Every day it's bad news. It can only go down further.
Neal Bawa [00:05:11]:
You know, millions and millions of homes are in foreclos. And I'm like, I don't understand this. I don't understand. I mean, I'm from the Warren Buffett school of investing, which is, you know, when things are cheap, you buy them. So I'm like, but I don't want to make a mistake. You know, I have this money, this, that I've saved up over the last five or six years. I want to go out and buy as many single family homes as I can. But I don't want to make a mistake.
Neal Bawa [00:05:34]:
What if I'm just an idiot that knows nothing? So I decided that I would basically educate myself. And I did that in the typical way that, you know, technologists and engineers do. I said, I'm going to mine as much data as possible and try to get insights from that data. So I started mining websites like Bureau of Labor Statistics and Zillow and Trulia and Redfin and you know, all these other sites that realtor.com that you've heard about in the real estate area. And I'm mining gigabytes of data and putting them into a statistical analysis software called R. The software is R and statisticians know it. And you know what R does? It makes it easy for you to take huge amounts of data that you know nothing about and give you insights, right? These days, AI does it and it even does it better than the software. But back then there was no AI.
Neal Bawa [00:06:23]:
So the software would give you insights, it would give you correlation. So you could say something like, show me real estate profits that are made in this city and this city and this city and correlate that real estate profit with these various things that I'm looking at. What is the highest correlation? Is the correlation of profits highest to population growth or job growth or income growth or home price growth or crime reduction or schools. Where's the correlation? The connection? The biggest, right? And then based on that correlation,...