EP 511 - How Joe Pizzurro Raised $30M+ in 6 years and Built a $100M Real Estate Portfolio.

Joe Pizzurro (0:00)

Start with three million, and give yourself attainable goals that lead up to it. If you wait too long, you're gonna miss it, because they kept waiting for the perfect moment. The perfect moment will never happen. The perfect time is now, really.

And then you may look back and change your mind later, but you gotta at least take action, I think.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

It is my pleasure to introduce, and Joe, I always, I think the first two times I met you, I butchered your last name, so help me out here. Joe Pizzurro.

Joe Pizzurro (0:29)

Perfect. There you go. Okay.

SPEAKER_2 (0:31)

There we go.

Just like it looks, Mr. Joe Pizzurro, our resident alliance member who recently joined the alliance with us. He's raised over 30 million in capital in six years, so no big deal. He's the founder and CEO of Break Chain Capital Investments, and joining the capital party with us to share his insights from his journey building a $100 million commercial real estate portfolio across multifamily and self-storage over 5,000 units, in just over six years, which is really impressive. Over $100 million in assets, $100 million in AU currently, over 5,000 units. He's raised $11 million personally, and his team well over $30 million in a pretty short timeframe. And in the kind of market we've had the last six years is super impressive, starting around COVID. So I'd love to get into that. But welcome, Joe. Good to have you.

Joe Pizzurro (1:18)

Yeah, a little behind Eric, but we're catching up.

SPEAKER_2 (1:21)

Yeah, hey, we're getting there. We're getting there. Yeah, man, great to have you on. I was really looking forward to this one because you've done so much in such little time compared to most people who got in the business around COVID, who generally weren't as successful because of the rate hikes and bad deals and things like that. So I know you do multi-family and self-storage, two of the more popular asset types.

So I'd like for you to briefly go over your business model and what you guys are trying to do this year leading into 27

Joe Pizzurro (1:49)

Yeah. So just to your comment, it was a tough time to start, but also I think a good time to start because it weeded out a lot of the competition of other groups that were not doing well due to the market. So it really gave a chance for some of the newer sponsors and good operators to shine during this down cycle. But yeah, I know I got started with multi-family and then transitioned to self-storage. Although I still do both, but in my opinion, a lot of my investors like the diversification. There's pros and cons to each. So we have both in our portfolio and we can pivot between the two depending on what's more favorable.

But I think the self-storage is very strong cash flow. I'm not sure how many self-storage folks are on the call, but very low optics, very low maintenance, easier to buy, less capital to raise. But you don't get the good equity upside that you can get from apartments. You don't get as good depreciation and tax benefits. You still get it. It's not as strong.

There's pros and cons definitely, but we like both. Most of the units are storage though. That's why it looks so high. They're a lot smaller, but they still work very well. But to get to your next question into 27, I set a goal for our company last year. We want to 10x our growth from 100 million to 1 billion AUM in 10 years, which I think is doable. I think it's important to have good aspirations, high goals, but not too unattainable. So you can build confidence along the way, the small wins along the way. But yeah, just going into next year, we're looking at both. We actually, we won't talk about it on this call, but we have an apartment and a self storage under LOI right now. So we're pursuing both at the moment.

SPEAKER_2 (3:41)

Very cool.

Which one did you start with? Which asset type did you first? And what motivated you to initially pursue a career in multifamily and commercial in general?

Joe Pizzurro (3:53)

I've told this story a few times, but it's worth telling. It's a good analogy. First of all, I wanted to start with, didn't want to, it's more about freedom, having not trading your time for money. And so I skipped the part of being a buying single family. I bought a couple, but that was too linear, in my opinion. And so I went directly for, like some folks say, I was just at a Grant Cardone event. He says, go for the 100 unit deal on your first deal. It's possible if you pull in the right partners, but I think starting, to me, in the game Monopoly, I always wanted the red hotel versus the green houses, right?