What's up everybody? My name is Julian McClurkin, you're Chief Storyteller with Tribevest.  Today we're doing another stories of tribe investing. Now today we catch up with Jeff Geagan, who in 2006 attempted to invest with his family and friends and fell a little short. Find out how Tribevest has helped him get back on track. 

Can you tell everybody who you are, where you're from, and a little bit about your investment background?

I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time in Ohio. I went to the University of Toledo for college and there I met Travis Smith, the CEO of Tribevest. We're actually fraternity brothers and became really good friends. 

I became an accidental landlord. It made me realize that I didn't want to be an active landlord. I'm not a handy person by trade. And I just didn't have the psychological makeup to be a landlord. I wanted to avoid all the problems caused by tenants but then I had a group of seven friends and said why don't we try to do real estate together and we bought a couple of duplexes, but we did it all wrong. 

We were friends that wanted to get rich in real estate, but we had no rules of the road established so you know who's going to show prospective tenants the properties that were vacant? Who was going to cut the grass? Who's going to pay the bills? We went to very expensive real estate attorney offices for each LLC. Everything was just really complicated. We barely left with our friendships intact. It goes back to, it's really hard to do business or real estate with friends and family. So I kind of gave up on it. 

But then Travis told me what he and some of his other friends were doing in the way of passive real estate. Travis steered me to some of his friends that were just starting a tribe and said, Well, maybe you want to give this a shot if this is what you're interested in. And at first it sounded scary because I thought, well this didn't work with friends and family, how is this gonna work with complete strangers? But then once I committed to the passive side of things, where you’re only picking investments and we're not active, and that Tribevest was really going to solve all the issues that I had before in group investing. 

You were talking about getting a different LLC for each property. Can you talk about why that might be important for people to want to do and why Tribevest specifically makes it easy to get multiple LLCs?

I think there's a lot of debate in the real estate community still, when you buy an active property. Do you need an LLC for each one? Or can you just have one umbrella LLC, that would cover everything? There's a huge debate. Still, I'm not the right expert to talk about it. I would just say I could see how Tribevest, if you are in the camp of wanting multiple policies for each one, how easy it really is to have them all formed. 

What are the names of your tribe that you're in? I know that we talked earlier and he said that we are already familiar with your tribemates, Jim Pfeifer and Annette Grant. 

Sure. So the first one he joined was 11 Partners. That was the first one where most of us besides Jim, were very new to syndications. So the commitment level was very small. We did a commitment of $150 a month so we had enough funds to access our first syndication deal. 

You learn really quickly that syndications isn't as complicated as it looks. So that gave me the confidence to do the second tribe, where the stakes are a little bit bigger. I've already invested 10s of 1000s of dollars and it’s spread out in different asset classes. So now it's not just multifamily apartments. We’re in self storage, mobile home parks and industrial warehouses. So it's been an educational journey and exciting to learn about the different asset classes that you can invest in. 

Was it kind of hard to trust Tribevest going into this?  You know, they're opening up a new business banking account for you, maybe with a bank you've never used before. Was it hard for you to trust them? 

There was no concern that I had about the safety of my investments through Tribevest. Tribevest is very transparent, about the company Tribevest, is the hosting of the platform. But really, we are still an independent company formed through our LLC so our LLC that we host is still the entity Tribevest just helps us obtain that LLC in a very affordable way. But the business bank account, it was seamless, it was incredible because the great thing about Tribevest is you see visibility, so your personal account is linked to the Tribevest business account. But then it has a banking dashboard that you can see all your teammates are making their monthly contribution, their one time capital infusion on a timely basis when they committed to.

I know you’re in Colorado now, but whenever you want to fly back down here closer to sea level, we can play some basketball. 

I would love to Julian. Promise to take it easy on me okay. 

Once again, a huge thank you to Jeff Geagan. If you wanna learn more about Tribevest and Tribevesting go to Tribevest.com. Until then, I'll see you next Tribe.