Adam Torres and Geoff Stuhr discuss the Jets and Capital event.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Jets and Capital event coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Geoff Stuhr, Managing Partner at Smart Asset Capital. Explore Smart Asset Capital and the Jets and Capital event.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I’m in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I’m at Jets in Capital. And let me tell you, this event is packed.
There’s jets, there’s super cars. I grew a whole hangar full of people mission based individuals. And my guest is Geoff. Geoff, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. All right, Geoff. So have you been to a Jetson Capital event before? I’ve been to one of them in Salt Lake City a couple months ago.
What brings you back, man? This thing is insane. The energy is crazy. The connections are fantastic. The like minded individuals that you connect with can really be accretive to your business. There’s opportunities for fundraising. There’s opportunities for partnerships. And it’s just a great community to be involved in.
Now, Geoff, you have a podcast. Did I hear that right? I do. I do. Come on, man. I love promoting other podcasters. What’s the name? I appreciate it. It’s called Winning Wealth. And so it’s not, I, we have a real estate investment firm and fund. But it’s not just real estate focused. You do talk a lot about real estate.
I don’t know if it’s called winning wealth. It’s about wealth, health, and happiness. So we’ll bring on people that you know, have other business outside of real estate a lot of entrepreneurs, and then we’ll even bring in people that are doing things you know, that are more health focused and either that could be mental health, that could be physical health and then, and then just happiness too, right?
Mindfulness. So we’re trying to bring on experts in each of those. And it’s almost like one of those if you’ve ever heard of like building in public, like we’re trying to, you know, build our wealth in, in, you know, our, our life and, and you know, bring elders on that journey with us. And so we share a lot about our business and what we’re doing from a financial perspective, but also, you know, how do you how do you become the, you know, the best version of yourself from a health perspective, from a happiness perspective?
And so it’s going well, we’ve We’re we, we did pause it for like a couple months around the holidays, but we’re going to get back to regular scheduling. Posting about a couple, couple times a month. What, what’s your favorite part about being a podcaster and doing the show? You know, I, I, I hate to say it, but I do like to have a microphone on me and I like to talk
I like, you know, I, I try to tell myself all the time, two years, one mouth, so I listen more. I genuinely care about other people. I li I love hearing other people’s stories and how that could pertain to me and people in our community and our guests. And you know, I love sharing our story and as well, so, you know, selfishly it is, a way to promote what we’re doing. So there’s, you know, there’s no doubt about that, but also it’s to be able to connect and learn. And the other thing is too, when you, when you have a podcast and you bring someone on, that’s an expert in their space, in your field, you’re able to build a connection with that person much better than just saying, Hey, can we hop on a zoom call, right?
We did a podcast, we’re blasting it out to our network. We’re having, we’re chopping it up and giving you content and, and you get to know them a lot better. And then I, you know, I might be in their city. They might have nothing to do with real estate, but it’s a cool person that I could connect with and, and meet down the road and, and build a relationship with.
Talk a little bit more about your business. Yeah. So Smart Asset Capital is the private equity real estate, like investment arm of our real estate company. So we have Smart Asset Realty, which is an investor focused brokerage that started about 10 or 11 years ago. We have smart asset property management, which is a third party management company.
It manages around 4, 000 units in an over a million square feet of commercial real estate in Southeastern Wisconsin. And six years ago, we started smart asset capital as a way for investors to invest alongside of us directly in a completely passive way and get to take advantage of the same tax advantages of being a full partner and owning the deal.
So we have a lot of clients that are investors. And they, they own their own properties. We manage them for them. And then they’ll come on board as an investor partner with smart asset capital and really become part of the family. And, and so we buy in the fund, we buy industrial real estate.
That’s cash flowing on day one. So we don’t do ground up development at this point. But we, we, we look for warehouses, manufacturing facilities, distribution centers that have great tenants you know, or, or we feel like we can retent them in a, in a quick and efficient matter and be able to distribute that cashflow from, from rents to investors on day one.
So you come into the fund, it’s a, it’s a higher yield play with also tax advantages. How’d you originally get into real estate? Like where’d that begin for you? Give me that young story. And wait out. How’d you get started? So I’m 35 years old. You know, I started making money as a sales guy out of college.
I you know, I, I say sometimes to real estate people too, I say that it’s sometimes it’s in your blood. So my grandma had owned Duplexes. Her whole life and never really didn’t have a job other than that. Oh, it’s like grandma, grandma had you. You know, RIP. And she’s, you know, she’s up there. So I look it down and she, so she, you know, she always had planted that seed.
And then I met a business partner of mine who we’re still partners with this day. I met him 15 years ago, we were in college or just out of college. And he was getting into real estate. He had bought his first duplex. As I started making more money, I was like, I need to park. This capital somewhere that’s going to be able to give me a return, right?
And I liked real estate because it’s illiquid. Like I believe in real estate. I believe that rents are going to go up in the future. It’s a hedge against inflation. It’s a way to get cashflow outside of just your normal income. So, you know, then it just evolved from there, right? We went from buying, you know, single family properties and duplexes, this, you know, small apartment buildings to bigger apartment buildings, a hundred plus units.
To, to buying, you know, then we start, then we started, you know, buying opportunistic deals in all many different asset classes. So we have a self storage facility, office buildings retail. And we started around that time. We were also, we, we found some industrial deals that we liked. And the more that we did industrial real estate in Southeastern Wisconsin, that corridor up from Chicago to Milwaukee, Milwaukee over to Madison and Milwaukee up to green Bay and, and the Fox Valley.
We really like the economics and the tailwinds for industrial real estate. There’s obviously an e commerce boom. That’s not going to stop. They used to call Milwaukee the machine shop of the world. And so there’s a ton of manufacturing there. It’s a, it’s a low cost living state. It’s a low cost of labor state.
So businesses are putting their operations there. And, you know, it’s some of the lowest vacancy in the country for industrial real estate. So Walkershaw County, I think I just saw 0. 8% in, in vacancy rates. So there’s a ton of tenant demand. You can buy them at really solid cap rates and really get a lot of great cashflow.
And we have a team of 65 employees that go to work every day and making sure that we add more, more value to these properties and continue to build. That’s a, and that’s what we’re doing. So we, we we’re offering. Really solid returns and you know, doing everything that we can to, to grow the business.
And, and that’s that’s one of the reasons I’m here. And yeah, it’s just a great community. Amazing. So Geoff, last thing I want you to do, I want you to look into the camera, tell people how they can learn more, how they can connect. Yeah. So thank you very much for having me as well. But again, my name’s Geoff Stewart.
Company’s called Smart Asset Capital. You can go to www. smartassetcapital. com. And you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Geoff with a G so it’s G off. I get that every day, but G E O F F S T U H R on LinkedIn. I post quite a bit on there. We also have a podcast, as we mentioned before, called winning wealth.
You can find that on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen to podcasts. And that’s the best way to find us. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over and speaking to the listeners, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Geoff, man, appreciate you making some time for us. Thank you so much.