SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
This Creative Thinker Makes Bank on Real Estate In Weird Way With Ben Uyeda of Homemade Modern
27 Feb 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. In the last episode, number nine, you met the 15-year-old who sat on the board of a Japanese company, made $15,000 per day selling Beanie Babies in a super weird way, and now sells over $80 million in cars every year. All right, guys, our guest today is Ben Weta.
Now, Ben graduated from Cornell with his master's in architecture in 2005, where he then continued guest lecturing. Now, in 2006, he founded Zero Energy Design, where his work was featured in Architectural Record and Popular Mechanics.
Ben continues to run his own firm in Boston, right there on Milk Street, and is actively investing in real estate in a not so common way, which we'll discuss on the show. So, Ben, are you ready to take us to the top?
Well, maybe just a little bit higher than we previously were, but let's call that the top.
Such an architecture major response. Well, dude, listen, we've had a ton of fun together, whether it's been out on Santa Barbara, going out sailing to the Catalina Islands. And, you know, I knew I really liked you when I saw how competitively you played pickup football on the beach.
Nathan, I think you're mistaking me for yourself. I'm pretty sure you were the one that was like launching people in the air. I'm not competitive.
I don't know what you're talking about.
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Chapter 2: How did Ben Uyeda get started in architecture and real estate?
And that's sort of like the Brooklyn of Boston. It's sort of hipster. It's definitely been gentrified to some degree. And when I saw that there was a Whole Foods going in, I started looking for empty lots right around that.
Real quick, Ben, I want to dive into that for a second. Did you get a plan from the town center or something where you knew Whole Foods was coming, or were you just driving, being observant, and you saw construction starting and said, shit, I should look at real estate around this area?
I actually saw that there was a proposal for Whole Foods to come. So smart. local thing, local, some sort of media or website, and that some of the current residents were protesting it or were sort of mildly against it because they thought it was displacing a sort of more traditional sort of ethnic grocery store.
I sort of looked at it as the analytical side and doing sort of comp research and stuff like that isn't the part I enjoy the most. I prefer the sort of design and construction part. So I said, well, I'm sure Whole Foods did their due diligence on sort of picking locations. So I will sort of piggyback off of their research and start looking for land within about a half mile radius of them.
And that's how I found the lot. And typically, when developers sort of do these kind of things, they try to use as little capital as possible and then go as fast as possible. And I knew as a designer that I was going to want to take my time and really figure out what was the opportunity to build something really amazing on this site. And I didn't want to go fast.
So I had to figure out a different model financially for thinking about how to make that, again, not be a liability. I had to figure out how to make my interest and the things that I think I'm good at not actually cost me money, but instead sort of amplify the financial opportunity.
Via a creative mode of thinking, which is not typical in the development space.
Right, it's all speed and capital.
Totally. Ben, real quick, let me ask a capital question real quick. I know you had partners that probably thought more about this than you did, but what did you buy the piece of property for and what was it? Was it just land? Was it something already there?
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Chapter 3: What unique strategies does Ben use to identify profitable real estate opportunities?
Are you going to use a service like Airbnb? Are you going to find long-term renters? What's your vision?
I'm going to experiment a little bit because, again, as much as I sort of have a hunch about sort of the future in some ways, I try to be pretty honest about what I don't know. So I'm in the process of negotiating with a buyer to sell one of the units, and we got a fantastic offer.
Okay, Ben, come on. You can't say that. You know what everyone's going to be thinking. They're going to be going, what is the offer? So if you can't give a number, could you maybe give a range?
It's right around half a million for the smallest unit.
For one unit. Yeah, it's great. So you put in a million, one unit, and there's three, is going for potentially around 500. I mean, so the markup here is incredible. And you can really credit that back to the creativity and design that you've put into it.
One of the things, just to jump in real quick, is that when I talked to real estate professionals, they all said to, well, we did the analysis. We looked at our comps. You should be building two-bedroom, two-bath apartments because that's what sells. And then I asked them, well, how do you know that's what sells? And they go, oh, well, we looked at all the things that sold in that area.
But all the things that were in that area had all been built more than 30 years ago. And there wasn't any new buildings. So they were doing a false sort of comparison. So they were saying that because this is all that exists, this is the only thing that should exist. And it was so maddingly... It just drove me nuts how confident they were about such bad data.
Meanwhile, when I actually interviewed people that had bought those two-bedroom, two-bath apartments, overwhelmingly what I saw confirmed actual data about the demographics of Boston, which Boston has one of the highest rates of young professionals in their 30s that are unmarried.
What people were doing was buying these two-bedroom, one-and-a-half, or two-bath apartments and turning one of the bedrooms into a closet or office. They didn't need it. No. And so it's also more expensive. It's much cheaper to build loft-style buildings with one really nice bathroom and bigger closet space. When you also look at the average woman in her 30s that is in the sort of...
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Chapter 4: How does Ben leverage community input in his real estate projects?
Well, I would say, yeah, the Leatherman or something. It's like the multi-tool. I would say Gmail kind of is that.
Awesome, man. Yeah, look, I think really valid points. Use what you already have and optimize the hell out of those before you start looking for new stuff. All right, number four, if you need to outsource something, whether it's video or production or design for your business, which websites do you typically use?
I don't really outsource too much. I'm not that much of an efficiency or optimization thing. I try to align things with motivation because I'm prolific when I like the work and I'm lazy. when I have to do spreadsheets. But I will say the one thing today, the little hack where I used outsource services is combining Blue Apron with TaskRabbit is the quickest and easiest way to get a personal chef.
Yep, so smart. I also use Kitchit for getting chefs in cities when I'm traveling. Both great tools. So, okay, last question to the Famous Five. Ben, if you wish your 20-year-old self knew one thing, what would it be?
Oh, I don't know. Like, I think the problem with my 20 year old self is that I thought I knew everything.
I wanted you to say like, like drink more organic coffee or something like something creative off the whim.
Yeah, but it's like, again, with like the optimization thing, it's, you know, I was so falsely confident at that point. But I kind of needed to be in order to be, you know, have that hubris was functional and that it pushed me to try things that I wasn't, that were beyond my capabilities.
So maybe like something like intentional ignorance. Yeah.
I feel super lucky with how things have turned out. I wouldn't want to change anything. I would love to observe my 20-year-old self just for shits and giggles. Just to enjoy that blissful, youthful arrogance. I certainly wouldn't want to interrupt that inevitable flow that's led me to where I am.
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