Starting Out As A Real Estate Developer | Scott Choppin with Dwellynn- Financial Freedom through Real Estate

Scott K. Choppin is the Founder of the Urban Pacific Group of Cos.

Scott oversees all operations of the Urban Pacific family of companies, including business development, capital acquisition, and strategic planning.

Prior to forming Urban Pacific, Scott was Director of Land Acquisition for the Multi-Family Development Division of Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group. In that position, he was responsible for all land acquisition activities for the development of luxury, market rate and senior rental communities throughout California, Colorado, and Arizona.

Before joining Sares-Regis, Scott was with Kaufman and Broad Multi-Housing Group. As Senior Project Manager, he was responsible for all activities related to multifamily development, including the acquisition, entitlement, syndication and development of over 1,900 affordable multifamily units throughout the Western United States.

Ola Dantis: Thank you so much for joining us on the Dwellynn Show. I’m your host, Ola Dantis. I’ve got the legendary Scott Choppin with us. Hey Scott, how are you doing?

Scott Choppin: Ola, great to be here. I’m doing great. Thanks for the invite and I’m so happy to be here with you.

Ola: Yeah. I definitely can’t wait to dig in a little bit here. So I’m sure you can do away better…

Scott: You’re the one who’s ever called me legendary, by the way.

Ola: There’s always a first time, right?

Scott: Yeah. I’m going to tell my wife, you said that. “Hey, listen, you know the guy I met, he said…”

Ola: And this is on recording too, so she can hear it.

Scott: You’re right. I have the proof it.

Ola: Get her to subscribe and give us a review while she’s there too.

Scott: Yeah. You know, I’ll tell her to watch this. Just like, see what you see.

Ola: I like that.

Scott: Great to be here with you, Ola. Thank you.

Ola: Awesome. No, please. Just kind of tell our listeners a little bit more about who Scott is and kind of what you’ve been up to and what you’re doing lately actually.

Scott: Sure. So Scott Choppin and I’m the founder and CEO of a company called the Urban Pacific Group of Companies. We’re a real estate developer based in Southern California and we build new construction workforce housing. In fact, we created a specific type of model called Urban Townhouse or UTH. I’ve been doing real estate development for 35 years. I grew up around it, in the family background real estate development. I worked for several years professionally for other companies and then founded Urban Pacific in 2000. Now 20 years, in fact, this year 20th of March is 20 years of operations in the real estate development space.

And basically in the last three and a half years have really moved to totally focused on this workforce housing space because we see both the need for it. Families that need middle-income housing, think of working-class families. But also it’s a great business model that allows us to, really what we say Ola is, we are pairing private capital with workforce housing. That’s like our stand or our narrative about this product type. We’re like everybody else having changes in the marketplace related to coronavirus and you know obviously that’s true for everybody. But I will report it actually because we house, our units house multi-generational families. We’re seeing a really positive effect from what’s going on now, where families want to recombine in larger family groups. Our units have five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and still, we are this space where people go to when they move out of other places, they move into our units which we’re really happy for and anticipated that before this recession came. But you know, now that we’re in it, we’re happy that it’s performing the way we expected.

Ola: Wow. A lot packed into that. I cannot wait. I remember when one of your team members reached out, I was like, I cannot wait to talk to Scott. I’m literally looking at the development of a town here in Houston. I’m actually looking at a LIHTC deal right now. So, affordable housing workforce housing, you know, not a major overlap, but there is that kind of sweet spot. So cannot wait to jump in. So first and foremost, maybe we should just do that. What is workforce housing for those that we know don’t know that term.

Scott: Yeah. So that’s a great question. So the way I term, and it’s a great question because everybody has a very different definition of it. So the way we define workforce housing is it’s rental housing for working families. And workforce housing doesn’t have to be for families, but that’s part of the way we define it. Like you’re working on the LIHTC deal, so part of the way we define what is middle income or working-class incomes or incomes that are between 80 and 120% of the local median incomes. So it would be for whatever county you’re in, for us it’s LA and Orange County. And it’s really intended to sit between true affordable, right. Your LIHTC deal you described would be for families that are below 60%. On the other end of the spectrum, you have your true market rate, which is luxury class, say high-end, no income restrictions, and our product sits in the middle of those two. We call it middle-income housing, workforce housing, those are sort of very used interchangeably.

But the key for us is that the families that we serve really don’t have any housing options in the new development marketplace that served them specifically, right? If you’ve got your affordable housing, that’s government-subsidized that’s for families and seniors, individuals that are in these low-income categories, market rate right now is predominantly serving, Gen Z, millennial. So you have your studio one-bedroom product, serving that demographic, which is appropriate. That’s a big demographic cohort. But we really identified this niche of really large working-class families, think blue-collar, work in the service economy, work in the retail economy, work in construction and through the combining of their family income earners.

So like one of the characteristics of our families is that there are multiple earner families. So, you know, if you were your Gen Z, new entrance into the job marketplace, renting a studio in downtown Houston. As soon as their job changes, they have to move out of the unit, right. They can’t afford the unit anymore. In our families, we’re looking for between two and five wage earners per household. So if anyone person’s employment situation changes, you have between one and four other income earners that are making up the difference. And in fact, we call that the economic sharing lifestyle. So they’re sharing incomes and expenses across the family group naturally. Like they’ve already lived this way, we’re just providing a unit type that’s coherent with their lifestyle.

Ola: Wow, fantastic. There are so many things I want to ask you because obviously, I’m a big geek when it comes to like development. I’m really into adaptive reuse as well right now. We just saw the property with the MEP guys and an office building, we’re looking at as well. So I’m just kind of into develops, but before we even go really technical, you mentioned that you kind of grew up in real estate development and I wonder if that kind of helps you now with your career. But I just kind of want to go back as well. How did you really get started? Because, you know, before you become a developer, I mean we all know the famous developers, Trump and Jared Kushner. Well, before you become a developer, what was that process like and how did you kind of get started?

Scott: Yeah. That’s a great question. Like the joke I make is that you know, no one chooses real estate development as, like they meet with their high school counselor and, you know, you take the test and they go, “Gosh, you could be a plumber or you could be a real estate.”

Ola: Right. Right.

Scott: And in fact, you know, as I talked to people, a lot of people don’t even know what a real estate developer does. Right. Like the joke, they go, “Oh, so you design buildings.” And I go, “Yeah, I don’t design it literally, I hire an architect.” “Okay. You don’t do that, so you build the building?” Right, I go, “Well, I don’t swing the hammer, but I hire construction people.” So after that, a couple of times they go, “Dude, I don’t know what you do.” And so the way I put it is my uncle Mike and my dad, that’s the family business that I grew up in both real estate developers in their own right. My uncle Mike predominately in the commercial office development space and a lot of apartment development. My dad predominantly on the apartment development side. So it gave me a good background. This is answering your question; it gave me a great background about what a real estate developer was at a really basic level. Right. Like, you know, okay, you find a piece of land, you design it, you get the government to approve it, you build it, you know, you rent it and do whatever people do.

But I think what I never really held until I was like, you know, 18 or 19 years old is like, why do you choose that? What would prompt one to choose that as a career? How do you make a living at it? How do you make it be a profitable business if you’re going to be an entrepreneur? Michael Mike, basically, he used to tell us, he said, “We’re entrepreneurs and real estate.” Meaning an entrepreneur has to take a business or a project from A to B, right. You start with nothing. And you go to the end result, which is a valuable project, you know, hopefully right. That’s the goal. And that you basically have to do anything and everything in between those to get from A to B whatever it takes. There is no set standard of things that you do. You’re going to have roadblocks; you’re going to have the government throwing roadblocks in your way politically. You know, design-wise, you’re going to have the market go against you. Capital is available or not. Land is available or not. Constructions are costly or not. All those things sort of you put in. And so I always loved the way he described it, you know, entrepreneurs and real estate, we have to take a project through to fight each step to make its final value.

The other anecdote, or, you know, sort of allegro I use is, it’s like being a conductor of an orchestra. Most people haven’t been a conductor of an orchestra but everybody sort of knows what that looks like. And I use that analogy because basically, a conductor is responsible for creating the whole event, right? Like you have a concert in Carnegie Hall, the conductors responsible for picking the music, for hiring the team. Right. And what I say specifically is the conductor knows what the violinist should play. He doesn’t, or she doesn’t play the violin themselves, but he goes, they fit with this, the cellist and the violinist and the people playing the flute. And I know how that all should fit together and what they should be playing, but I don’t actually play it myself. I don’t play the violin per se, but I know what it should produce and what the final result should be, and how it fits together with the overall team. And basically, the conductor is responsible for delivering a final product, right. Even if they don’t do any of the parts, the component parts themselves, they bring it all together, right they’re that synthesizer of that, if you will.

So, you know, having a family background instructed me on that, but ultimately it was reading one of several books. But the most famous one people would know is How to Make a Million Dollars and Best Seen in Real Estate On the Weekends, you know, famous fifties book. And that book, I read a lot naturally and I was sort of looking for at 18 or 19 years old, like, what am I going to do? Right. Like, I knew I was ambitious to do things, to produce an identity, to be successful, to make money, to have money to take care of my family. You know, I knew at that point that I wanted to have a family and that this book opened my eyes to what being an entrepreneur meant. Meaning yes, go from A to B, but why do you create that valuable project? Well, at the end of the day, it’s to produce a valuable asset that is more valuable than what it costs you to buy it and you know, repair it or build it, you know, if you build a new building.

And so I think it’s sort of the combination of the background in real estate, plus just observations of what other people were doing in the marketplace vis-a-vis reading. You know, watching other people doing it. I even worked in the trade for a couple of years out of high school and sort of that started to paint the picture before me and I go “Oh, okay. You create these projects; you sell them or you rent them at the end of the day to create value. And, you know, if you do it correctly and in a disciplined way, you can make a lot of money.” Right? I think certainly the development industry is known for producing great value, great profits. It’s also incredibly risky. And so you learn how to make the money, and then really you spend the rest of your career learning how to mitigate risk. And that’s where I am today.

Ola: Yeah. I think not to kind of dive too deep, but I want to actually. So yes, a lot of, you know, especially young folks who see like developers and think, “Wow, I want to be a developer. I can choose what private jet I use or whatever.” But as we know, you and I, development is, you have to really know what you’re doing, you have to mitigate those risks. Right? A lot of pre-con work as we call in our industry, pre-construction work. So what are the ways, just a few, you mitigate those risks, right? And on the back of that what are the barriers to entry? So if there’s a young person is listening to our conversation thinking, “Hey, maybe I want to be a developer.” Right. What are the barriers to entry like when you were 18 reading those books? What were the things that you had to overcome?

Scott: Yeah. So, great question. So mitigate risk. I mean, obviously, there are infinite numbers of ways to mitigate risks. But really, if you think about it, like, what are the risk categories and how do we mitigate those? So when you think about what a developer does, you know, you identify a market that you want to operate in both geographically. And also are you doing apartments? Are you doing it for sale? Are you doing retail, commercial? And so inside of that is to create a strategy that anticipates future changes in drift in the marketplace. Now that’s not an easy thing. I say it like, I don’t mean that it’s simple. Oh yeah. I figured out a great strategy and don’t mess it up, right? But look at things that are going to be future trends and anticipate as best you can using your networks and your knowledge about what product type you’re going to be. And this is why we do the UTH Workforce Housing as we from my knowledge knew that we had an under-supplied story in California for middle-income families. That these families would be intensely stable in a recessionary environment because of this multi-earner structure we talked about. And so, as I started to formulate this program about three and a half years ago, I was like, “Nobody’s building in this marketplace. Nobody’s building new housing for large families and middle incomes.” Now, I didn’t know I could make a profitable business out of it. But we started to experiment and formulate the product in a way that we knew if we produce the results that we intended would be profitable, right?

So you pick a good strategy, you know, the land is and you know, buy like…The running joke I say is when I was a young project manager working for other people, there was no deal I couldn’t do. I’m a great problem solver. I could take on really difficult, hairy deals. And gosh, I’ve got this opportunity. I can make this work no matter what it took. Now, I go, no, don’t do that. Like, I’m looking for the easiest possible project. Now, there is no easy project. But, you know, as an example, like I was having a conversation with a guy, he ended up building an apartment building on a fairly sloped site. Right. And I go, “That dude, I don’t do that anymore. I want to build like, dead flat. I don’t like any slope. I mean, you know, maybe a little bit, right. But nothing intense. Like I look at slope sites, you know, my team brings them to me, I go, “Nope, next.” Sites that have environmental issues, leaking underground tanks or oil and gas in the dirt, no next right. Anything that’s like doubtful about the zoning or entitlements needed to approve the project and any sort of heavy lift, no next. In other words, you sort of get disciplined to reject a lot of sites and do it very quickly. Right. Versus, you know, when I was young I would hang on to everything, I could, I can make this work. I can make this work. And I think that’s a young person, young in their career or young generally is just an optimist, right? Like people who are developers have to be optimistic, right. We’re self-selected to be able to sustain a very difficult business. And I’m still an optimist, right? It’s just now I’m much more seasoned. And I go, “Oh, I did that, that didn’t work. Oh, I did that. That didn’t work. Gosh, let’s not do that again. That was terrible. Let’s not do that again.” And so eventually you sort of start to eliminate all these other choices, right. If you have 50 choices of land locations and land types, so you’re going to pick two out of 50 and 48 are going to get rejected.

The other one, I would probably I’ll finish this question with this. When you underwrite a deal, right? So you’re in your deals in Houston, you’re looking at your LIHTC deals, maybe talking about your adaptive reuse deal. You know, when you’re young and optimistic, super hyper optimistic, you go, “Oh, rents are 900 bucks a month for this unit. And I comped them out. I researched the market and cost, but my deal needs like 1100 a month to make it work, I think I could get 1100. I can push the rents.” Now I’m like, “Dude, I have to be at 900. And I have to match the market and do a better product, or like be under the market and have a better product.” Right? Like I increased the likelihood that I would have a smooth, successful lease-up of that unit.

Now I’m being sort of generic in my answer here, but it’s sort of the idea that you don’t be optimistic for optimism sake that you actually look at it and you go, “I don’t actually think I can achieve that extra rent.” You go, “No, I got up like the market is the market, right.” The stats are what they are. So believe them. Like, don’t think you are magical because you are optimistic and have a get it done attitude that you can somehow overcome the statistics in the marketplace. Right. Or let’s say the other one would be, “Oh, a lot of new developments coming in downtown Houston and they’re building a lot of apartments. It’s a big apartment pipeline, but my deal is special. I can overcome, I’m downtown also. And boy I’m much better.” No, you’re not.

Ola: I’m laughing so much in the background, Scott.

Scott: Right. So it’s just, and I don’t know, like, it’s hard for me to say it. But it’s conservative underwriting, but I hate using that distinction because people go, “Well, what does that mean?” So I’m trying to give examples of what conservative means is. You know, a friend of mine, he got, it’s sort of an old saying, but you know, assume it takes twice as long and cost twice as much as you think, right? You look at your performance and I go, “Gosh, this is going to cost me $10 million to build this thing. I really should assume it’s 20 million.” Now I say that most deals wouldn’t assume a doubling of construction costs and that the deal could survive. Like it doesn’t work anymore. But the attitude, the approach is correct. Like, assume that it’s not going to go easily and better than everybody else. Assume it’s going to be a little harder or maybe a lot harder. And if you underwrite it and it survives that test, then when you get into the actual execution of the deal, you will always have friction. A Little bit more time than it takes, the inspector didn’t show up, the city is slow. You’re leasing slower than you intended. You didn’t get 900, you’re getting 875. The market went against you a little bit. But if you built in this like cushion of conservatism in your proforma, then you’re going to survive. And that’s really what I mean, you know, you’d learn how to be a developer. And then you spend the next 20 years of mitigating risk.

Everything I do right now is lessons that I’ve learned over the years from myself, my own breakdowns or market changes against me, or watching other people do it. That’s why I always encourage people and this sort of goes to your second question, which is to get a mentor. Like joint venture deals, partner with somebody. Assume when you’re getting into the business, that you don’t know everything. And that there’s a lot of other people that if you make them the right offer, a free time for an internship or I found a great land deal, I tied it up. I’m bringing it to you, Mr. Developer you know, to do the deal. And I want to be a partner and teach me, right. Maybe I’ll like to take a little less of an equity position in the deal or get paid less if you’re trying to flip it or whatever, but let me hang around. Let me go to meetings, let me read all the documents. Let me help. Interning for free is the other option. In fact, I always encourage people, Ola, to go to my LinkedIn profile. It’s just Scott Choppin on LinkedIn and there’s an article I wrote called Six Ways to Build your Real Estate Development Career. And that’s basically, I’ve got a really long-form article of like all these methodologies if you want to get into real estate development and learn at getting a mentor. You know, getting a mentor or doing an internship is one of those, but several other strategies are in the article that can help.

Ola: Oh, wow. Scott, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate that. Thank you so much for the offer. So just a quick question though, are you doing those in California? Because all we hear about is there are no deals in California. There are no deals.

Scott: Yeah, that’s a great question. Not only am I doing deals in California, both recently and right now literally, we’re actually accelerating during coronavirus because of this multi-earner household where again people move out of a studio and they move into our unit with their family or roommates. We’re actually accelerating. But the basic answer of this is this product, this UTH model a lot really comes out of the California marketplace, right? Like in other words, I don’t want to say forced, but we were required to innovate because of how California is meaning high housing price, high rent, high land costs, high construction, incredibly difficult political process. I mean, you’re in Houston, which, you know, extensively has no zoning, not in the way that we have. And you know, we’ve looked at Dallas and Austin and, you know, I actually love Texas to be quite honest with you about it.

But we’re in the most difficult zoning marketplace in the entire United States. I would argue California is more difficult than a place like New York City, which is itself very complicated. But the thing about New York, at least in my knowledge of the marketplace and people that I have in my networks that are in New York, is that New York at some level wants more housing, right? Like they go, “We’re a really tight market.” And you know, today we can argue that New York’s deeply affected by coronavirus, but it was the hottest market in the United States. It will become that again in the future at some point. But New York really has this attitude of like, they want development, right? Yeah. And you know, neighborhoods, neighborhood groups, and neighbor councils are resistant. But California has a deeply embedded resistance to new housing projects. Like politically in neighborhoods, city councils are hyper-responsive to neighbors to kill off projects. And it’s getting a little bit better more recently, but we come from a very difficult process and environment for that.

And so what that does, when you do get a product like UTH, it works really well, but that really came from the environment, right? Like, you know, if you’re an animal that evolves on an island and you know the predators, etc. and you know how to deal with that, then you survive. And that’s basically what we are where our product, our design of a product type is a function of the California marketplace. Now I will say this, we’ve tested the model in places like Portland, Seattle, Denver. We’re actually looking at Dallas for a period of time, pre-coronavirus. And this is a great asset for all those marketplaces. As long as you can find a middle-income family demographic that has a stagnant or low income versus housing costs, right. Now, every metro has a different formula. Portland is different than LA is different than Denver is different than Dallas. As long as you can look for that gap, right? This is housing costs. This is incomes. Make that spread when it’s big enough between, middle incomes and high housing costs. And that’s where our formula works.

Ola: Fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I just want to mention something. I was looking at a deal that was in a municipal, solid waste landfill. When you made that comment of environmental, I was like, “Oh my goodness, that’s the dilemma.” That’s one of the deals I’m grasping onto. But I think from what you’ve just said that’s probably going to be a pass anyways.

Scott: Yeah. And I never want to be the person that like squelches somebody’s optimism, but think of it this way. You’re by choosing sites that have less complexity or less problems or less friction as the way I describe it, right? Friction being anything that costs your project more or slows you down or increases complexity, that’s lowering the chances of success in the deal. So when I look at a flat site or I look at a clean site, or I am delivering a product type that’s undersupplied and I have no competition really, and I can produce profits. All those, what they do is they increase the likelihood of success. And that’s ultimately what it comes down to complex sites have a lower likelihood of success. Simpler sites have a higher likelihood, right?

Just generally, like if you look at the comparison now I don’t say any site is simple and development is never a simple process. It’s complex relative to other real estate investment types, say value-add. You know, you can scope apartments and do paint and carpet and countertops and counters and cabinets. And you know that’s a simpler process. But in many cases, the profitability is less too. Higher risk, should it be a higher profit? It’s just that you got to take the higher risk while mitigating it as much as possible, right? So people look at California like you describe and go, “Oh man, California is like the toughest marketplace in the United States.” And I go, “It is.” But we’ve figured out a product type that we can fit in the specific niche of certain neighborhoods, certain land types, certain renter profile, certain build type, certain financial structure, equity, and debt. That the combination of all those basically mitigates risk maximally, right. Reduces complexity as much as possible, which increases profitability and mind you while also being innovative, right? Like we’re not competing with 15 other big developers in that marketplace. Which is what’s happening now, where you’ve got the studio of one-bedroom product that’s serving Gen Z and millennial, very good marketplace, big demographic cohort, largest in US history, right? The combination of Gen Z and millennial, right. That’s really where people should be competing, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

In that marketplace, all the big players are in that marketplace, which is just a signal and another complexity, right? When you have more competition that makes the marketplace more complicated to assess it for your project to be successful or not. And then also when a recession comes, if you’re competing against the Trammell Crows and the Holland Partners of the world, if you’re not them or some proxy of them, then you’re going to have a harder time competing. They can lower rents more, right. Trammell Crow can lower rents and wipe out the majority of their competition if they want to. Like, they have a big enough financial statement that they don’t worry about that. I mean, you know, they’re concerned about it. They want it to be profitable. So don’t get me wrong, but you know, they go, “Oh, you know, XYZ company, they got a competitor product and they’re 900 bucks a month. Okay. I’m Trammell Crow. I’ll be at 850 all day long. I still am doing okay, but I’m going to basically drive them into the ground.” Right. I mean, that’s like, you know, very rough peer competition. And that’s the reality of it.

So you go, I can either compete in that space, or I can go into another niche or another contrarian space where the competition is less or none, if you can find that. I’m not saying it’s easy and simple. And it does require being on the edge of a marketplace, right. Not right in the center of it, both geographically, but also product type. And you know, you’re not going to get everybody going with you. Like some equity investors won’t look at a five-bedroom, four-bath UTH unit. Some lenders won’t lend on that. It’s too extreme or too different for them. I’m encouraged by that though. Right? When people tell me, “Gosh, I’ve never heard of that before. Wow. That’s really different.” In fact, the day that I hear great, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. That’s a great idea. That’s why I’m starting to worry about it and go, Hmmm I have to change it again, or I got to look for something different.

Ola: Right. Yeah.

Scott: I mean; I don’t say we won’t ever compete. There’s always competition, but you can choose the marketplace that you can compete in and do it in a way that lessens competition or you have better innovation. Right now we have a better innovation and there’s plenty of small and mid-sized developers in California. Just none of them are doing this particular innovation.

Ola: Right. Yeah. You said a lot of stuff that I feel like I’ve heard from John McNellis. I don’t know if you’ve heard of his name yet, The Urban Land Institute. I think he put book out that I read as well. So I just, I’m looking at a time. I wish we could talk about a case study from start to finish. But maybe we would have to have you back.

Scott: [Inaudible 31:17] You know that’s interview number two.

Ola: Yes. Yes.

Scott: So that’s [Inaudible 31:21] to you.

Ola: I feel like I can hear my listeners saying, “Ola, let’s talk about a deal.” You know like a quick deal, but we probably have to bring you back. Because we’re definitely dwelling into the quick rounds. These are going to be quick questions, quick answers.

Scott: Yep.

Ola: First question. What makes you Scott unique? What is that differentiating factor that separates you from the next guy or the next girl?

Scott: Two quick things. One is my organization for our continuous competitive learning, right? Like I’m just like super hungry for new ideas, new knowledge, always. Not that I’ve ever had any doubts that was a good thing. I just realized how special it makes me. And then I think just the organization around you know, building strong networks, like being an offer of help to people around me, such that I can attract the best people to be of help back to me. So I formed the best teams and gathered the best people around me because my philosophy is to be, first and foremost, an offer of help, a powerful offer of help to those around me, and then ask for powerful help in return.

Ola: Wow, love it. You’re an avid reader, just like me, you mentioned. What was the last book that you read? What was the one thing that you picked up from that book?

Scott: You know so the one book I’ll mention that I’m really encouraged by is Grant Cardone. Everybody’s heard of Grant Cardone. It’s his 10X Rule book. And he’s got this concept in there called omnipresence. It’s really a marketing and sales terminology, but it’s the idea that as a company, as in any business, right, whether it be real estate development, real estate investment, you really need to always be putting yourself out into the marketplace, in the public domain. Public speaking, being on podcasts, writing articles, social media. And omnipresence is this idea of being pervasively out in the marketplace. Being basically what Grant says everywhere all the time to everyone, right. That the goal. That’s the idea of doing that. And I don’t know that it’s physically possible to do that in the way that he writes about. But I’ve basically spent the last three-plus years really working that deeply. You know, predominantly we do it to help us expand our networks of investors to invest in our projects. But I would encourage anybody in any business to do that, right. Because in today’s social media-driven environment, digital content, digital media, you have to be doing that. In fact, Gary Vaynerchuk says basically every business now needs to be a media company. Like you are required to do that if you want to compete effectively.

Ola: Absolutely. Absolutely. Final, final question, Scott. You’re doing amazing work with this niche you know product type. You’ve obviously got your family, you’re a busy man. What do you do for fun?

Scott: Yeah. So great question. Well, not enough. Let me start there not enough. I do a couple of things. In fact, as I’m sitting here in my studio, right, there is a Stratocaster. So I played guitar my entire life. I’m a real big fan of the blues genre. So you could think, you know, guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert King, all those old school blues guitar players, so I’m a big fan of that. And then when I can, I try to get out into the water. The city I live in is Long Beach, it’s at the Southern end of LA County next to Orange County, right on the coast. And I try to go sailing when I can. So, you know, going out, sailing on sailboats.

Ola: Nice. Really appreciate that. If there’s somebody listening and thinking, wow, maybe then the California market or anywhere in the country. And they want to kind of get to know you maybe plug into everything you’re doing, what is the best place people can reach out and get to know you more.

Scott: Yeah. So here’s what I would do as an offer to your audience. Anybody can email me. My email address is choppin@urbanpacific.com. Tell me you were on Ola or just me you saw me on Ola’s show and tell me, you want to get our free eBook, which is entitled, How to Survive and Thrive in a Recession, which I think is a good subject matter right now given, you know, the rapid and deep changes that we have going on in the economy. So send me a note in an email and we’ll send out the ebook, we’ll add you to our email list. That’s a great way to get a hold of me.

People can go to our website, of course, www.urbanpacific.com. And then go to our investor education section. There’s a ton of stuff, all the stuff that we’re talking about today. You know, underwriting markets, new market cycle trends, you know all that tracking and reading and analysis that we’re doing in the marketplace. We’re just sharing that out onto our e-blast and blog post. So a lot of good information coming out.

Ola: Scott, really appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time. We definitely have to bring you here for part two. I really appreciate you. Thank you.

Scott: Yeah. Thanks. So let’s do that case study. I’d be happy to do that.

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