#8 - Real Estate: How The Wassermans Do What They Do

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Gelena Wasserman** (0:31)
The partnership was gonna dissolve, and you guys were just not gonna do real estate anymore.

**Keith Wasserman** (0:36)
Yeah, because he was in big credit card debt, and we weren't making much money the first few years, so he was really ready to get a J-O-B, a job, you know?

**Shaan Patel** (0:44)
You almost couldn't even spell job. You're like, I don't even know what this is. It's a G-O-B. J-O-B?

**Keith Wasserman** (0:50)
I've never had a job in my life.

**Shaan Patel** (0:57)
Yep, that's my friend, Keith Wasserman. And if you can't tell, I think it's been a little while since he had a job. Keith and his wife, Gelena, are into real estate. And I've been excited to do a real estate episode for a while. Real estate intrigues me because instead of going to a desk and working a job and getting a salary, people who own real estate have properties out there that are working for them. And that's true wealth to me. When your assets earn you money, pay you in cashflow every single month.
And so I wanted to find out how they got started in real estate, how they make money in real estate and the difference between their two models because they're very different.
They are a husband and wife duo, which is really cool, but they actually do very different things.
Gelena started off as a broker on the commercial real estate side. She was one of the few young female brokers doing commercial real estate in California.
And she's since transitioned to doing her own real estate development projects where she buys a building and fits it out to serve the purpose that she's looking for. Her company, Skye, is really interesting. So she talks a little bit about that, and Keith talks about his company, Gelt. What Keith does is different. Keith is what we call a syndicator, where he raises money from investors and he buys buildings that he thinks he can add value to, increase the rents or cash flows, and then sell it after some holding period of maybe five or seven years.
They got started back in 08, right after the real estate crash, and owned at that time zero dollars of assets and knew nothing about real estate. And if you fast forward just about 10 years, together they've purchased over a billion dollars of real estate assets and done phenomenally well. So I'm really glad that they flew up from LA to do this interview, and I hope you like it. But as always, you guys will let me know. Just feel free to leave a review. I read every single review, and so that's the best way to send me feedback. All right, time for the episode. See time.
We're ready, okay, great. We got a full house today. So we have Gelena and Keith Wasserman. This is the real estate episode. I've been looking forward to doing a real estate episode for a while. Mostly because my strategy is just, if I'm interested in it, I just assume all the listeners will be interested in it, and I'm interested in real estate. So we've had a lot of tech people, we've got some cool other people coming on, like poker pros and people who have made a million bucks in all different kinds of ways. But real estate, I think, is probably the most common, consistent way. Real estate is the sort of game of the rich. And so I'm excited to have you guys on to break down what you do, how you do it, how others could do it, that sort of thing. So why don't you guys give me each just sort of a 30 second intro on each of you. Gelena, we're gonna start with you, because so far over breakfast before this podcast, I've realized that Gelena's the one I go to for the good stories. So why don't we start with you? Give a quick little intro.

**Gelena Wasserman** (3:38)
A quick intro is I started in office sales and leasing doing brokerage, and I was a tenant rep broker, and I transitioned into buying single-family spec homes, building them ground up and renovating them and selling them. And from there, I transitioned into purchasing land in Los Angeles, mainly urban infill locations and building ground up apartment buildings, as well as purchasing older existing non rent control apartment buildings and extensively renovating them from top to bottom.