John Corcoran 12:45
And I’m sure we could do a whole episode on this topic. And I know we’re gonna get into your entrepreneurial journey and everything. But what were the hard parts? Was it like, you know, socializing? Was it like going out in the evening? Or was it in the evening at your house with no one else around? What was the most challenging times for you?
David Shamszad 13:05
Ah, I’ll give you I’ll give you an anecdote that answers that question. Every Saturday evening, after that, I met up with a with a group of oddballs and played pickup basketball from 10 a 10pm, until midnight. And that’s what I had to do every Saturday. Because they all in recovery. It was you know, I have a man I have a feeling that a bunch of them had a we had some had some past that they were trying to work their way out of some of them might have just been security guards with weird work schedules. But that kept me away from bars that kept me away from the really difficult cut socializing that you mentioned. Yeah. Now, you pop the beer in front of me right now. It’s really no problem. But just the smell of it. Like the smell of whiskey would would. Oh God, it was it was it would terrorize me. So I just needed to stay away from it. So yeah, a lot of basketball at midnight.
John Corcoran 14:04
Basketball, man. That’s great. Now I want to go further back in your journey. I love to ask people about what sorts of entrepreneurial side hustles they had when they were 789 10 years old. And used some great ones. Sell it. You’re buying 20 pizzas at lunch, bring them to your school and selling them by the slice. Buying boxes of candy at the convenience store selling them at a markup. Talk about some of these.
David Shamszad 14:28
Yeah, so candy in middle school. That was that was my first that was my first foray into entrepreneurialism went to the convenience store on Lakeshore bought a ton of candy Skittles m&ms, nerds, whatever they’re all about 5560 cents. Just tell them for $1 Nice nice Mark. Yeah, day for a week or two. And then you have cash for Yeah, a dime bag of weed and movies. Then On Fridays, I go to escape from New York pizza on Haight Street in San Francisco and I order as many pies as they could make. And then I take them back to my school a few blocks away and sell them all buy a slice. For another. Yeah, and that was enough for even more time backs.
John Corcoran 15:19
Did you ever get cracked down cracked down? Like, the school or anything?
David Shamszad 15:24
No, I don’t think they mind it. Um, I think you know, they probably had to respect the entrepreneurial spirit a little bit. And you know what it meant to like more kids weren’t leaving the grounds to go get lunch? That’s probably good.
John Corcoran 15:37
That’s pretty good. Yeah. So kind of simultaneously to your sobriety journey. You’re on the on the business side, you kind of an interesting background, because you’re really passionate. You go to Dartmouth. You did rowing you did crew there. Even though you had this entrepreneurial background, you end up kind of working in a facility for wayward kids after college. How did you end up getting into that? It because of kind of looking at your whole journey? entrepreneurial side makes sense. But I’m not sure how you got into that role.
David Shamszad 16:13
Yeah, this one always that one always is a curveball to people. Um, as long as I was in high school, and all the way through college, I always wanted to help out. And I always volunteer for something. There was a grammar school near my high school that I went to their kids at. When I got my driver’s license, I volunteered for a program called Meals on Wheels, that would take leftover restaurant from foods and take it to homeless shelters in San Francisco. Then when I got to Darby there was the same thing. There’s a lot of communities in the surrounding area that are yeah, there’s there’s some big socio socio economic, and educational challenges there. And I would volunteer with a bunch of kids in need. I was with a program that worked with kids with chronic illnesses. For my last couple years of college, and by the time I graduated, I just realized, you know, what, sooner or later, like, I do want to get into business and find a pathway to, you know, to chart my entrepreneur, entrepreneurial course. But like, I’m also at my happiest when I’m helping people. And I’m going to spend at least a few years after college, just giving back, you know, I had some great opportunities, I got to go to some awesome schools, my high school and my college were incredible. Let me spend a few years giving back. So that’s what I did when everybody was at the career fair at Dartmouth, and going to the Lehman Brothers, the now defunct Lehman Brothers booth and hold me backs, who, you know, name your investment bank, this is 2004. So investment is all the rave. I was like, going over to the two or three little nonprofits in the back. And I found one program that just a thought was incredible. They worked with at risk, and foster youth and youth that had were in the juvenile justice system. And so it’s kind of a halfway between jail and getting back into the community. So I spent a few years there, and incredibly hard work, really challenging, really rewarding. I got it, I got a message last year, you know, almost 20 years later from a kid that I’ve worked with, who wanted to let me know, tracking me down on Facebook, whatever wanted to let me know that he had his own business, and he had a restaurant, and he had a family. And he told me that I changed his life, you know, and I’m like, Man, even if it was just that one, dude. Hopefully, there was a few others that helped out but just that one story. I was like, I was great. No, that’s, that’s worth it. Yeah. So then after that, you know, there was also a part of me that wanted to get into business.
John Corcoran 19:10
And from that, you end up getting into real estate in 2007 not the best time to be jumping into real estate that comes out. Well, we know that now. We didn’t know at the time. It seemed like a brilliant decision.
David Shamszad 19:25
Right. I should have picked up some more flyers, you know, at the career fair, but I really didn’t I just bought a so by the time I finished working,
John Corcoran 19:34
by the way, well, that’s roughly the equivalent of the guys who got into crypto about a year ago. Right? When you’re turning around, right, because so but you you go to work for another company, you’re doing commercial real estate going into ’07 to ’08 What was that? Like? That must have been a tough time.
David Shamszad 19:51
It was tough. It was it was a grind. So I got back here. I didn’t have a job. I used to send out resumes talk to everybody who knows someone. So I was like, maybe Gotta be a paralegal. I looked into doing all kinds of stuff. And I eventually hooked up with this broker who was my boss for a while. And he’s like, Hey, do you want to come here and grind and try to make some deals? Like, come on over? You know, it’s all commission based at a time. Right?
John Corcoran 20:16
and as a commercial real estate firm. So you’re like knocking on doors trying to get in touch with property managers and building owners?
David Shamszad 20:22
Yeah, basically. Yeah, or tenants. Right. So I did. In the early days, I did a lot of tenant rep. So I’d help someone like you find an office? Yeah. Okay. It was, it was a grind, there was there was a lot more businesses closing and shrinking than opening, expanding. So it was 500 foot, you know, tiny law firm office, helping them find a new space and making 1000 bucks. And it was a lot of those.
John Corcoran 20:47
Yeah. And so 2011, then you end up starting your company. What was it like starting that company around that time period, after we’ve had Oh, seminal, he had a couple of years of real estate.
David Shamszad 21:00
That was the thing, he was a grind. That was when I was really struggling the most with mental health and alcoholism. And by the time I pulled myself out of that, I mean, I was barely making it anyways, I had a few contacts and everything, but I had buried. So when I got sober, I was like, I just need a new start. And I’m going to try going out on my own. I had, I had a tiny book of business, and I figured let’s just give it a shot. And like get as you know, my backup plan was to apply to law school. And if I if my business didn’t take off, I had already taken the LSAT and we’re starting to, you know, fill out the fill out application forms.
John Corcoran 21:40
And as someone who’s still 15 years later, still paying off that my tuition check from law school, I think you made the right decision.
David Shamszad 21:49
Yeah, it was it was yeah, it was I was lucky, things took off. I got a few clients. What I right off the bat, as you mentioned, it was it was tough time. So if you’re, if you’re just doing one thing in real estate, it can be tough, because there’s always something going on. In real estate, there’s always a time to be working with buyers or sellers. But if you’re only in one niche, hit stop. And commercial real estate is super simple. You know, right now, commercial real estate is in a tough spot, and it was back then too. So I started looking at other options and other ways to create revenue streams. So I was I was getting into residential, I was helping people find multifamily apartment building properties. And then you know, I got a team around me that could help that could manage those properties. So now we’re doing some commercials and multifamily. As we grew and grew and made a little bit of money, we started putting some of our own money into those deals with some of our relationships and our clients.
John Corcoran 22:48
So you represent like a buyer of a property, but you put some of your money
David Shamszad 22:53
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we kept going in that direction. And then like I said, you know, all of a sudden things were in the mid 2000 10s, there started to be a real migration of people into the Bay Area, and tech jobs where tech companies were growing, like, as fast as possible, gobbling up space, people were moving to get into apartments. And if you were in, you know, if you were in multifamily housing, there’s a great opportunity there. Some of the investments that we made did really well. And our clients were growing. So we’re helping them buy new properties, and we’re managing those properties for them. And then we still have the the commercial side too, which started to pick back up. Yeah.
John Corcoran 23:37
And now, one of the I know one of the projects you’ve worked on, walk us through this project. It was a property that you purchased the property kind of fixed it up leased it out, and I think it was student housing around UC Berkeley. Talking about that one.
David Shamszad 23:55
Yeah, that was a wild one. So me and a partner and other EO guy, by the way, in one of the East Coast chapters. We thought, student housing in Berkeley, there’s a real housing crunch in Berkeley, and the campus is growing and there’s never enough beds or rooms for all the students. And we found a great opportunity to get a big building. It’s about 125. Person building two blocks from campus in real bad shape. And so in late 2019, early 2020 We got a bunch of money together, got a bunch of other investors to bring money in. And we took down this this big PC dorm, and then about a week afterwards in a dorm before Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I’m gonna share the rundown. Then a month or two after we close? was the first time we offered a COVID. Nice. So it’s awful. John Deasy. Literally, these kids were running by our office throwing their keys under the door and flying back to wherever they were from. So it was a ghost town in Berkeley and our building was virtually empty.
John Corcoran 25:12
And were they not paying or how did that work for the first year at least?
David Shamszad 25:16
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, they’re the rent projections work put. And they just stop paying. So Oh, yeah, yeah, they stopped paying, and they left and then the entire school year, it was empty. Wow. So now, instead of being able to get our plan was to slowly renovate one floor at a time while the rest of the units were filled. And we had no, there was no one there. So we had to figure out a way to pay mortgage out of pocket who forgot, you know, the bank worked with us, I would say a little bit. And but the rest of it was just grinding to get through.
John Corcoran 25:51
Did you have to get additional investment in order to pay for all that, or what do you do?
David Shamszad 25:57
I will leave I’ll leave it at this. We we did what we had to do to take pay the mortgage every month. Yeah. Every month was a new is a new adventure. Yeah, yeah. And it was stressful. But we had, we’d already raised the capital to do the improvements that we had planned to do over over about four years. Let’s just do it all. Now we got an empty building. Let’s knock this thing out. And it was fabulous. It turned into a real class act of building, we replaced pretty much everything inside. And it was, it was still a pretty affordable place to live. But it was it was a nice place to live for a reasonable rent, which is hard to do in Berkeley. And our target was people that wanted a nice living experience. But like, didn’t want to break the bank living in a, you know, brand new apartment by themselves. Unfortunately, fortunately, school open the next year that have been closed for another year, I don’t know if we would have still been able to wow, that was a big gamble. Yeah, it was It wasn’t supposed to be that big of a game. You know, it was supposed to, it was supposed to go according to plan. But then, yeah, it turned into a pretty high risk, high reward scenario. So school opens back up. And by then we’ve renovated the whole building. And people loved it. Everybody moves and we hit our rent projections and exceeded them. And the building’s running like clockwork, and we had not, we had not necessarily plan on selling it. But we realized two things happen. One, we’d added a ton of value all at once. And the rent the rents we were seeing indicated like okay, we it’s more, it’s worth even more than we thought. And then two, we reached a point in the market cycle where interest rates were so low property values were so high, that even though we were projecting to sell in like 2026, we looked at the potential exit valuation, and we’re like, even with a prepay penalty, to the bank, it may still make sense to exit now, and just pay out all the investors pay ourselves and move on to the next project. So that’s what we did. So towards the end of last year, we we got out, I retained a small, which is pretty consistent with our business model, I retained a small ownership in the property with the next buyer, they wanted to keep us and as a capital partner, and as the operator so we actually still run the place and own a small piece of it, too.
John Corcoran 28:30
That’s really cool. What a great success story. You can kind of roll the dice and it ended up working out okay for you. That’s really cool.
Yeah. Good thing it go didn’t go one more year. Well, Dave, this would be great. I know. We’re almost out of time. I’ll just wrap up with a question. I enjoy asking everyone, which is a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude publicly, to those who’ve helped you along the way. And a lot of times on the asset people I mentioned, they’ll immediately say family or friends or, you know, team members or employees or something like that. But really what I love to hear is more like peers, contemporaries, others in your industry, maybe who’ve helped you who would you want a shout out and thank you.
David Shamszad 29:12
I would shout out the guy that hired me after I was in social work when I had no experience in real estate, and he was at MRE Commercial. His name’s Richard Odenheimer. And he took me under his wing. And it was during a time when I was struggling quite a bit, but he didn’t. He didn’t show me the eggs, but he kept trying to work with me and made a home for me there taught me taught me half of what I know now, honestly. And he was great. And a lot of the lot of the things that he was doing at that point, his career, you know, are things that I’m still doing now. And I also have a bit of gratitude for Steph Curry, who is going to help the Warriors win on Sunday.
John Corcoran 29:54
He’s a bit of a warriors fan here. We can get back in the series and win this thing. It’ll be published way after that. But that’s okay. You can So Steph Curry that’s cool. Who isn’t so grateful to Steph Curry and then fight last last piece you’ve been EO member for a number of years what would you say to someone listening to this who’s considering becoming a part of EO what it’s what it’s like what is what it’s all about.
David Shamszad 30:18
I’m immensely grateful that I joined EO. It’s a place where if you want to be around people that will constantly inspire you, where you’ll hear and see and feel great ideas and great energy and be around a bunch of people’s individual success for the betterment of everybody in the group success. That’s a you know, I meet with, go to events and you meet with your individual form on a regular basis. And all of a sudden, you’re in a room with only people who have started businesses sold businesses, constantly growing their own individual brand or enterprise. And that’s that’s inspiring stuff to be around. Yeah, that’s, if that’s what you want to be. That’s what you want to do. Put yourself in that mix and be around those people.
John Corcoran 31:04
Where can people go to learn more about you and SG Real Estate Dave?
David Shamszad 31:10
Best place to go to learn about SG Real Estate is sgrealestateco.com. And you can also go to my own personal website to see more about my story, my background, and my forthcoming book. And that is davidshamszad – S H A M S Z A D – .com.
John Corcoran 31:32
All right, great. Well put those links in the show notes today. Thanks so much for your time.
David Shamszad 31:35
All right, talk to you soon.
Outro 31:37
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