Hey what's up everybody welcome back to another episode of stories with Tribevest. I am Julian McClurkin, your Chief Storyteller. And today you have the distinguished pleasure of welcoming Ryan Stieg. How are you doing?

Very good. Very good. Thank you. 

Yeah, I was really focusing on pronouncing your last name. 

You nailed it. It's usually wrong, so you got it perfect. 

I try my best. Kind of walk us back. Tell us a little bit about your investment journey.

I used to live in Phoenix, and probably bought our house the day the market peaked. So we were accidental landlords at the time, and had already determined that we would move back to Billings a couple years later. So when we did that we held on to that house, had remote property management, and just kind of held on to it, hoping someday to get back to the value that we have. So I’d always have an interest in real estate investing, but that was kind of the initial aspect of it. And it took several years before I thought we might need to do something more than that. So we started in 2016, going to turnkey real estate investing, which is buying a rehab house to have a tenant in it, and did that for a couple years in 2016. And I realized that that wasn't scalable, even managing a property manager takes time. So in 2018 I got turned on to real estate investing through syndications. Later that year, I went to a real estate meetup, and I met a guy named Jim Pfeifer.

He’s a cool dude. He is a cool dude.  

So Jim and I had conversations following that meeting. He was telling me about this idea of a vehicle called Tribevest. It was a concept that was totally new to me. And so he and I carried on conversations and said, Hey, we're going down this path of real estate syndications and he said we can do this together, let’s find a couple other people. So that's how I got introduced to Tribevest and how it formulated into my investing career.

Before syndications, you invested in turnkey properties. Isn’t that a form of syndications? Can you describe that? 

A little bit, but it's all direct ownership. So when I invest in a turnkey property, I'm buying the house on my own. I’m 100% the sole owner. So but it is someone else's and are still outsourcing, the management and the labor and sourcing tenants. So syndication is also outsourcing all of the operations to an operator whereas turnkey is one single asset, but you're still accessing the property management, and finding a tenant, and rehabbing the property.

It's really interesting that you got that experience doing that because I can only imagine it probably gave you more confidence going into syndications, having that under your belt already, because you probably came with the wealth of knowledge that you get even with the LPs and GPs with when it comes to real estate investing. 

Yeah, I think probably the biggest thing that gave me is the comfort that it didn't have to be real estate that was in my backyard. So really, at that point, it's developing a trust in the operator.

Are there any other unique opportunities in Montana that you look at, or why don’t you invest at home?

One, the numbers don't make as much sense as they do in other markets. And so, being one that I'm not going to be the professional operator, right. I'm an investor. I’m a passive investor. And so I'm putting my faith in someone else to do a better job than I can do of that. But also, we're investing where the numbers make sense. And so for those two reasons, it doesn't it doesn't have to be my backyard. 

Can you give us a little insight about your tribe or tribes that you have? 

Yeah. So I'm, I'm currently in five tribes right now. And they all have different purpose. The tribe that Jim and I initially formed, it was just gonna be him and I, we were still looking who wants to do this, who wants to invest, and then started talking to family members about what I was doing, and they didn't have any experience but wanted to get invested in real estate syndications. So we're fortunate enough to align with some of my family members. So that's the most active tribe  that I have right now with Jim and three of my family members. 

I’m part of Left Field Investors, that's another connection that Jim and I have. So we have a founders tribe, a tribe of the 5 of us, and that is more just things that we all have in common and in alignment, we invested in Tribevest as a Founders tribe.

One of the other tribes is also part of LFI. That is a single asset investment. So that tribe formed with many groups from Left Field Investors members, and we invest in a single asset. 

And then there's one for those of us who are really curious about crypto, but really have no expertise in it. 

Yeah. 

And so it's a way to dabble and diversify without having a big expenditure or invest as ourselves. Yeah, that's another one. And then there's another one that's more kind of on the fringes. It's a group of people who want to explore new asset classes and operators and territories and markets. And so those are the five and they all have their specific purpose.

Is there any one specific investment that you can kind of just break down a couple of the numbers in and say, well, we've actually done really well in this or this one sucks? I’m sure the crypto one probably isn’t doing great.

So far the crypto one we just kinda close our eyes and wait for the crypto market to return but the one that I'm in the Jim and a couple family members is the longest active and we started in early 20. We had our first full cycle deal last year was a self-storage facility. We held it for about 16 months, and it returned about 55% in total. 

Let’s go! 

But the best, not only that, so it was a quick timeframe which wasn’t expected but the best part of that was now we also get to see that full cycle benefit. We're now no longer putting new money in, the money that we've invested to produce returns and invest in real investments for us so we're seeing that velocity of money in those investments because of the cycle. 

So now it’s truly a turnkey investment. 

Now it turns out it's own turnkey investment.

It came full circle, that’s cool. Sweet.

Wow, that was an amazing interview. Wanna say thank you so much to Ryan and maybe even encourage you guys if you want to invest outside your backyard, start with Tribevest. Go to Tribevest.com and until next time, I'll see you next time.