Fundamentals with Dave Seymour
Welcome to The Real Estate Espresso podcast, your morning shot at what’s new in the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Victor Menasce. This is the Weekend Edition where we interview notable people from the world of real estate investing. Today is no exception. We have a great guest. All the way from Boston, Massachusetts, welcome to the show, Dave Seymour.
Hey, Victor. Thanks for having me.
Well, great to have you here. Now, Dave, you’ve been at this game for a while, and I’m excited to have this conversation. But maybe before we dive into the details, give a little bit of your backstory and how you got to this point in your journey.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll make it brief because I know it’s an espresso shot, and those can go down pretty quick. Even with a double, I can get those down pretty quick as well. I’m not a sipper.
Long story short, I’m an immigrant to the States. I know you have a Canadian audience. You’re in Ottawa, I’m in Boston, but I grew up in the south of England. I’m a London kid from a blue-collar family and came to the States when I was 20 years old. Found my way through trading time for money, deploying the financial strategies that my father gave me, which was slim to none, and paid the price of financial illiteracy, I’ll be frank with you. Loved my dad dearly, but he never taught me how to create or manage wealth in any capacity.
Took a good government job. I served as a firefighter and a paramedic in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts for 16 years. Loved that job. As most firefighters tend to do, there’s always a second or a third job. I was no exception. I worked construction. I learned sticks and bricks. I learned how to try and get down to a frost line in January in Boston, which is always an entertaining video to watch. And, you know, it started there.
There were investors around the periphery of what I was doing in the construction world, and that was incredibly interesting to me because they looked a lot happier, Victor, to be honest with you. From the outside in, they looked to be doing a lot better than I was in my beat-up F-250 pickup truck. And that was my first exposure to the investor. And I ask questions. I mean, one of the things that I’ve done consistently well, I believe, in my career is to ask questions. If I’m the smartest person in any room, I want to leave that room immediately, just increase capacity.
I did some single-family flips. I actually started in the real estate game as everybody else was running out because I needed to, to be frank with you. It was a tough time in my life when I started in real estate, financially, emotionally, spiritually. And I overcame that and just deployed strategies that worked from people that have been using them.
I became known as one of the premier distressed asset investors in the state, and that led me to a national TV show, which was quite an adventure. We did a show called Flipping Boston on the A&E Network. And then there’s always transition in real estate. I think if you keep on trying to do the same thing the same way every time, it’s a recipe for failure, not success. You know, we transitioned into small multifamily assets. Got a nice little portfolio going, liquidated that portfolio and rolled that into where we are today. So, primarily development work, repositioning of large commercial assets. We’re looking at flex-~~used~~ 📝use assets right now. We’re focused on Southwest Florida because the team is allocated there.
And then I’m the dog-and-pony show man. I’m the voice, I’m the one chasing the capital, getting the LP capital in, servicing clients and executing on the business plan to the best of our ability. So that’s the short version, which is pretty good for three minutes right there, I crushed it.
Perfect. Well, all of that actually resonates very strongly with me and I’m sure with many of our listeners as well. If there’s anything that you’ve seen, let’s say the last 12, 24 months, what would that be? I think there’ve been shifts in the marketplace. Where do you see things as well? We’re also in Southwest Florida as well.
Yeah, yeah. Look, Southwest Florida is getting a bad rap right now, and I’m super excited that it is. And here’s why: when social media and mass media and pundits start sharing their magnificence with us, the mere mortals who are on the street every day, it creates a distraction of attention, which is great, because although Southwest Florida, yes, has—I’m not going to say fully plateaued—it’s met its water level for now, you know, the underlining data that supports how we all invest at this level, which is job growth, population growth, you know, the need for rental housing, none of those data points have flattened out. They’ve ~~continues~~ 📝continued to move in the right direction for investment opportunities.
But what has happened is, is so much saturation in specific primary markets. The MSAs are pretty much jacked. So, what do you do? You just turn your eyes somewhere else. You start finding those gems in the secondary and tertiary markets, and that’s where we’re still finding some nice delta.
So, the noise is great because it takes all of the wannabes out of the market. The underwriting that we’re going through right now, and the amount of volume that we’re looking at, has increased, not decreased, which is great. Still, sellers are holding on to wishes and dreams, but if you can gently educate the seller as to what’s going on in the marketplace, you tend to do well.
But the biggest challenge, and we talked about this before we started recording, Victor, is the amount of money that’s still sitting on the sidelines. And let’s be honest, if it’s sitting on the sidelines, I mean it’s getting devalued every second of every day, the amount of inflationary challenges. Would you agree?
Absolutely. And the thing is, the question is, why is it sitting on the sidelines? I think we’re certainly seeing investors sitting on their wallet. Perhaps they’re risk-averse, they see a lot of uncertainty in the market. I mean, just the uncertainty in the headlines, the fact that the White House is intentionally using uncertainty as a technique to maybe maximize negotiating leverage means that people feel unsure about the environment. And yet the underlying fundamentals really haven’t changed.
Correct. So good to hear that. If I could give you a hug right now, my brother, I would give you a hug. It’s the reality. We live in a world right now that is instant. Any piece of information I want, I could throw it in an AI system and get the answers immediately. And with that becomes a lot of loud voices, and you hit the nail on the head. It starts with the geopolitical environments in which we live.
Very soon—and take this any way you want, listeners, you personally, Victor—very soon we’re gonna start hearing about investment opportunities in the Gaza Strip. We just know it. It’s gonna happen, right? The seeds were already, the seeds were already sown. Out of all that human disaster and chaos, there will be people making millions, if not billions or trillions of dollars off of the back end of those chaotic times.
And to your point specifically, yes. When fear dominates the marketplace, there is a lot of money to be made. So any and all investors who choose to sit on the fear side of the equation, the opportunity will pass them by. Opportunity goes in one of two directions, towards us or away from us. It’s a simple fact. It’s all dependent upon the action that we take in that moment when the opportunity arises.
Look, a lot of investors are focused on geopolitical noise to make their investment strategies and, to your point, they’re not paying attention to the fundamentals, which haven’t dramatically changed. So look, from our standpoint, how do you overcome that fear factor to get the wallets to loosen up? You show, with authenticity, not wishes and hopes, really conservative underwriting. How do you get an investor to move the needle and come into those opportunities? And it’s education every single time.
You know, we created an education arm, right? We created an education arm because of the necessity, not because I want a couple of bucks from somebody to learn what I do, I don’t care about that. I care about them being educated so that when we put an opportunity in front of them, I’m not getting the first stupid questions that most investors will throw at a GP, right? The owner-operator carries the majority of the risk in executing on the business plan. So, you know, bringing them up that education gradient allows them the confidence to make that investment.
And again, full transparency, SEC compliance, you can lose every dollar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if they’re qualified and educated, they make a magnificent partner. They really do. So we focus a ton of time there, Victor, just to out of the comment, you know.
Well, I mean, think about what—even why does this podcast exist? This is a form of educational marketing. Nobody wants to be sold. No one wants to be pitched, right? And so the more that people listen to shows like this and really understand the nuances in the market. For example, you mentioned you’re in Southwest Florida. Well, guess what? There’s a shortage of industrial in Southwest Florida because so much of that land’s been pulled out for residential. I mean, there’s just so many things that have nothing to do with the macro environment. They’re hyper local. And they’re not gonna change on any time scale.
Yeah, it’s interesting again, you know, without beating that dead horse, whoever shouts the loudest gets the most attention. And one of my mentors said to me a long time ago, don’t listen to the loudest guy in the boardroom, pay attention to the guy who is saying nothing, because he or she is lethal. And I never forgot that advice, you know, so that trickles down into where we focus our attention.
You know, you talk about light industrial. We call it flex space in Florida, the flex space market. We just did a deal that was a 22 million dollar deal for a retail piece. And, you know, most people would look at that and say you’re out of your trees, ~~Jeff Bayzos~~ 📝Jeff Bezos owns the retail world. Well, he doesn’t. There are internet-resistant businesses that have, right, that have to operate. And then when you put, you know, a big national bank on one end, and then you put, you know, 120 brand-new construction housing units on the other end of this, this retail piece becomes, it becomes incredibly valuable. So hyper-focus is really what it’s all about.
I love it. So how has your investment thesis changed over the, let’s say, the last 12, 24 months? What do you, what opportunities are you seeing in particular in Southwest Florida? We’re seeing a ton. What are you looking at?
As a private equity shop, right—which is what we basically are at the end of the day—as a private equity shop, I say to my guys all the time, you know what we are? We’re delta hunters. We hunt delta. What’s coming in? What’s the flow look like? Where is the majority of the opportunity?
So we never started thinking we’d be in light industrial. We never thought we’d be in flex space. I never imagined I would take down a retail deal. So at the end of the day, my investors want to know that we can execute on a business plan that we put together based on fundamentals, and then we execute on it.
Look, craziness, dude. I even underwrote a high-end doggy daycare the other day. The numbers on doggy daycare is ~~redonkulous~~ 📝ridiculous, ~~redonkulous~~ 📝ridiculous what people will pay to have Fifi and Rex loved for a week while they fly off around the Caribbean, whatever it is they’re doing. So it’s supply and demand. It’s what makes sense. Every listener just shut me off right there, like, I was liking that guy until he talked about doggy daycare. But let me tell you something, you’ll love the numbers if you ever look at it, right? You buy that piece of land or it’s an accoutrement, an add-on, and you can put good services in place.
So our thesis hasn’t changed in the sense of hunting delta, but what we have done is we’ve now become agnostic. We’re very, very good at multifamily repositioning, ground-up development. We’re very good at that, but we’re also very good at using those same skill sets and techniques for a different commercial real estate asset class.
One of the things I’d love to get more focus on, if the numbers make sense, is storage units. I’ve known a couple of guys who have done really, really well in storage. I don’t entertain mobile home parks, although I hear there’s a very nice revenue source off of those as well. I don’t need to relearn the business for our company and our investors to do well because the techniques are already well established and the systems are in place. It’s just tweaking to be able to execute.
But again, I’m gonna go right back again: educate. I’m not gonna try and put a deal together until I believe I’m educated enough to be confident in putting that deal together for an investor.
I love it. Well, Dave, if folks wanna connect, if they wanna learn more, what’s the best way?
Yes, a couple of different ways. On the investment side, you can find us at freedomventure.com. You can Google my name, but you can find me on LinkedIn. Just put my name in LinkedIn. And if you really do wanna learn the nuances of what we do and how we do it and potentially partner with us, then just punch in LegacyWealthmasterclass. It’s a free masterclass, education class. Shows you what we do, how we do it, why we do it, and whether you wanna potentially partner with us. A couple of options right there. I’m sure the team will send you all that good stuff, Victor.
Terrific. Well, Dave, great to connect. And for the listeners at home, definitely reach out to Dave Seymour at LegacyWealthmasterclass and freedomventure.com. Links will be in the show notes, as well as the LinkedIn, a way to get in touch with Dave directly. And in the meantime, have an awesome rest of your weekend. Go make some great things happen. And we’ll talk again tomorrow.
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