EP 520 - Discover how Nicholas DiLeone closed 14 Deals totaling 1,700+ Doors and $100M+ in Assets

Nicholas DiLeone (0:00)

So, specifically, what we, and this is our secret sauce, I'll put it out there.

Put the new tenant in there, sell it with that new tenant with a longer term lease, and then add value. So really, just looking for under market leases in really good locations, right? It's like high demand, and then push that lease up to market or sell to an owner.

Tim Mai (0:19)

Welcome everyone to our HERO Capital Show. I'm your host, Tim Mai, and today, we have another amazing guest on the line with us, Mr. Nicholas DiLeone.

Nick is the Managing Partner and Founder of Leon Real Estate Partners, founded in 2020, a Dallas-based firm specialized in value add and core plus multi-family, RV parks, and warehouse industrial investments. With over 20 years of commercial real estate experience, having served as a Senior Asset Manager at Nuveen Real Estate, overseeing roughly a billion dollars in assets, then as a Head of Asset Management at Berkeley Partners, managing 60 industrial properties worth 700 million plus. He brings institutional rigor to every investment that he does, and he has since transitioned full-time into syndication. Nick has led Leon Real Estate in closing 14 GP deals, owning 1,700 plus doors, pads, stewarding over $100 million in asset and management. And his commitment is combining boots-in-the-grounds relationships, process and data analytics, delivering performance and personalized investor service. With that, everyone give Nick a huge welcome. Sorry, I got a cough right at that last part. I've been getting over a cold from the event. I can't believe it's still lingering.

Thank you so much for being on our show today. Let's start out sharing with us a little bit about your experience, especially how did you even get into the commercial space, the real estate space to begin with, and then some of the big lessons that you learned working at big firms and now on your own. Yeah.

Nicholas DiLeone (2:03)

So yeah, that background sounds really impressive. I will say working in the institutional space, a lot easier than running your own business and doing C-class properties. The A-class stuff is super simple.

It's like those guys think they're so smart and so sophisticated, but it's so much easier than doing the value add stuff that we do. So honestly, I got started in the IT space. A lot of people start out this kind of syndication. I started on the IT space. I worked for an Internet startup back in 2009, went bust. I was one of the last. We grew to 140, 150 people. I was one of the last three people we got bought out.

Tim Mai (2:40)

So thank you so much for being on our show today.

Nicholas DiLeone (2:43)

By a marketing company. And then I was like, I want to work for a nice, stable financial services company, not an Internet startup. And I found a job at TIA Craft. It's a pension fund building mortgage and real estate systems for them. So I was a business analyst, IT project manager. And I just fell in love with the business. We're buying those Class A, you know, office, retail, industrial, multifamily properties. And I fell in love with the business. So I pivoted inside TIA Craft to business opportunities and working there. And I got my master's at NYU. And that's where I pivoted to the business side. So I did that for a bunch of years, moved out to San Francisco. I was based in New York, moved out to San Francisco, left there, worked for Berkeley Partners for two years. And that's where I learned the more difficult space of value add. So we did just like we, a lot of us do the value add multifamily, we're doing value add industrial. So these were not pretty properties. A lot of times I tell my wife the uglier the property is, the higher the return is. She doesn't like stepping foot in the industrial stuff that was dirty and not the best, but you get better return. So I did that for a couple of years. That's where I learned LP and GP, stakes, general partnership, getting staked in those funds. Then we got sick of California, moved to Texas.

And COVID in some ways was a blessing for our family because we moved to Texas, COVID hit and that's when we started our syndication business. So we've been doing that for about six years, did multifamily, transitioned to RV parks. When we thought multifamily was a little bit kind of too pricey. And then we pivoted into the triple net space. I have a partner that I call him the Triple Net Ninja. He's been doing it for 20 years. We went full cycle on a deal last year. We bought it last year, sold it this year, went full cycle and there's a great return for LPs. And now we're in contract to buy a deal in Amarillo that's somewhat similar.