Social Media and the Tip of the Iceberg

The tip of the iceberg is when you see the photo at the finish or the picture of the building after it was purchased. Whether running a race or buying an apartment building oftentimes you will see in social media a picture of the apartment building.. What you are not seeing is the work that has been involved in the purchase.

When you see someone who runs a marathon and the picture of them at the end is something that everyone celebrates. Facebook is great at showing you the highlights, but not showing you all the work that is involved in getting to that point.

If you are running a marathon you are running in snow and rain and slipping on ice but still getting your kilometres in in order to be ready for your race. This happens week after week, month after month, whether you feel like running or not, you do it anyways. Until get to your race and then you run it and make it to the finish line.

When you are purchasing a apartment building you are not seeing the years of building relationships with owners, networks of referrals, broker lunches and relationships that have taken time to develop. You don’t see thousands of dollars that is spent on marketing and the hours of calls with people that are more interested in talking to you, then selling their apartment building.

You do not see the day-to-day grind of finding financing that will make sense for apartment buildings, talking to lenders across the country that will work to ensure a quick closing on a multimillion-dollar purchase. The preparation of hundreds of pages of a financing package, in order to be ready to send it to a new lender at a moment’s notice. Being told that this particular lender, needs this particular report, another document, more details on a particular asset or criteria in order to get the deal financed.

You don’t see the relationship building and time and effort that it takes to build trust and knowledge of what you do, in order to work with partners where you can’t advertise. You don’t see the hours of phone calls with potential partners discussing the details the apartment building purchase, and the lawyers, who seem intent on not making those purchases happen.

You don’t see the back and forth with sellers, that almost feels like a roller coaster that could give way at any time before you actually finally closed the property. There always seems to be one last hurdle that needs to be jumped, before you can actually close on the asset.

Then you finally close on the property and post a picture celebrating the closing.

And then the work really starts.

You dedicate hours a month, months into years, and then years into repositioning those assets working with property management, developers, planners, contractors, administration, and many more professionals.

Just my two cents…

Do the Work!