What’s All The Rage With Self-Storage?
It’s the kind of freedom and independence we all dream of…
Welcome back to Ep86 of the “Inspired To Invest” with Clint Harris.
Tune in! https://youtu.be/LMA1mFHUGIQ
Clint Harris is a seasoned investor from Carolina Beach, North Carolina. He reveals how he transformed his life by shifting from medical sales to real estate, starting with single-family homes and eventually conquering the multifamily and Airbnb markets.
His journey is a masterclass in strategic, aggressive investing and building a property management company that thrives despite market saturation.
Clint’s approach is both data-driven and innovative, offering valuable insights into achieving financial independence while maintaining high standards and stellar ratings.
Join us as Clint, now a general partner at Nomad Capital, takes us through the maze of real estate development, focusing on converting old retail spaces into high-value self-storage units.
Clint’s story is not just about financial success, but also about the importance of strong communication, integrity, and teamwork.
From managing unexpected challenges like natural disasters to fostering a company culture that empowers employees to become investors, Clint’s experiences highlight the power of education, networking, and personal growth in building a legacy.
Discover the secrets of aligning financial goals with a fulfilling quality of life, and why starting a podcast could be your next strategic move in the real estate game.
To connect with Clint Harris, go to https://nomadcapital.us.
Thank you to the REI Loop for bringing us this month’s episodes.
To find out more about this revolutionary software to help you streamline your real estate acquisitions/dispositions, manage relationships with clients, and scale your portfolio. Find out more at @thereiloop and online at https://thereiloop.com.
“Inspired to Invest” is proud to support the Beyond Success Program, a not-for-profit financial literacy program for students, launched by More To Give & MAK Investments. Find out more at @more2give.ca.
Join us again on Mar. 26 for our next episode!
Thank you for tuning into “Inspired To Invest”, hosted by @serenaholmesofficial & remember, “when you invest in yourself, the sky’s the limit!”
Real Estate Podcast Transcript
Serena HolmesHost00:02
Hey everybody, welcome to Inspired to Invest. I have Clint Harris here with me, from Carolina Beach, North Carolina. He’s a professional real estate investor entrepreneur and handles capital raising and investor relations at Nomad Capital. With a background in medical sales, Clint built a lucrative multifamily real estate portfolio, then converted to high performing Airbnb properties, which eventually led him to start going postal property management. For diversification, he transitioned over into self-storage investments, eventually joining Nomad Capital as a general partner, buying old big box retail buildings and converting them into self-storage units. So I think that’s a really interesting concept and we’ll dive a little bit deeper into that. But maybe you can take us back to what life looked like before, when you were in medical sales, and how you transitioned over into the real estate space.
Clint HarrisGuest00:46
Sure, and thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here. Appreciate the invite. So I had a 16 year career in medical sales, implanting pacemakers and defibrillators. So I worked, would go into surgery and help put the devices in.
00:58
It’s kind of a young man’s game. It does have a high ceiling, but you’re on call a lot, working nights and weekends, and I knew that. In my opinion, my generation I’m 42 years old, but my generation has basically lost the ability to save our way to retirement and I feel like most of us have to be aggressive and invest our way there. So I chose real estate as the vehicle, as a young man, that I was going to use to create an off-ramp from that busy lifestyle of trading time for money.
01:24
So my first house was a duplex lived in one half, rented the other half out and lived there for free, thought I had invented this new concept that apparently people have been doing for a thousand years, but it was long before I’d ever heard about house hacking or anything like that. So that started me on a journey of small single family properties. I bought nine single family properties before I discovered that’s a very slow way to get ahead, and then I took a promotion in 2017, moved to the beach in Wilmington, north Carolina. That opened up the door to buying small multifamily properties with bad month to month long-term tenants, converting those into Airbnb short-term rental units.
Serena HolmesHost02:04
And what’s the landscape like where you are Like? Is it a landlord-friendly state or is it more?
Clint HarrisGuest02:09
Yeah, very so. This is a beach town. Wilmington is a peninsula with four beaches around here. I specifically chose to invest on an island called Carolina Beach because it’s the DNA of the community. It’s been a beach island forever and short-term rentals is very much a part of that and I knew that wasn’t going to go away.
Serena HolmesHost02:28
Now I know that sometimes people go into short-term rentals and they might struggle with vacancy issues. What’s that like for you in that area?
Clint HarrisGuest02:36
So when I first the first time I pulled the data and bought my first unit in 2017, there was 1,128 active listings on the market. I’m an extremely data-driven analysis person. The one thing that you can’t control with short-term rentals is how many other listings are in your market. So it went all the way up to 1250 and then 1550. During COVID, we were shut down for a couple months and then everything exploded and we hit numbers that were absolutely out of the park because, all of a sudden, everyone was location independent and there was stimulus money. So the next two years were incredible. The two years since then started this past summer with 2,500 listings and we ended the summer with 3,600 listings. So there’s more than three times what I started with.
03:20
So my listings have still done very well for two reasons. Number one I’ve been doing it for longer than everybody else. So my listings have still done very well for two reasons. Number one I’ve been doing it for longer than everybody else, so I have more reviews. Number two I couldn’t find a company that could manage my properties and get the same number I was getting several years ago, so we built one. It took me two years, but we built out a property management company. That property management company now has 4,500 five-star reviews. My properties get the benefit of that as well. But then, that having been said, I am. I have two of three quadplexes in a duplex that we still own. I’m going to keep a couple of those because they’re tied to my children’s education. I got two young boys. The rest of them I’m slowly liquidating and I’m going all in in self-storage and passive syndication investments.
Serena HolmesHost04:04
Awesome. So I know we were talking about that a little bit before we hit record. Now can you talk a little bit more about your approach, Because it was really unique and I can’t say I’ve necessarily ever heard of anyone that’s got this strategy. So walk me back to the beginning and just explain for everybody how you’re approaching self-storage.
Clint HarrisGuest04:20
Sure. So my vision of my real estate investing career has always been that I want to fail fast. It’s my money, I’m okay with being cavalier with it and I want to move quickly to learn the lessons that I can, to get to a point where it changes my life in a very meaningful financial trajectory kind of way. I got to the part of my short-term rental journey where I was frankly burned out on tenants. An average property has eight to 10 tenants in it per month throughout the year and it’s a very active strategy. I replaced my income in medical sales through short-term rentals, but I did it wrong.
04:56
I was always looking for that quote unquote financial independence. Once you hit that the first time, I think most people realize that’s really not what we want. That’s a buzzword, it’s a marketing term. What we really want is financial, time and location independence, because those three things together create an independence of purpose. That’s where you go, where you want, when you want, do what you want. You’re not trading your time for money. Took a step back and I said what are the successful people that have independence of purpose investing in? And it was three things.
05:25
It was hard money lending and I didn’t have the seven figures it took to get started there. It was mobile home parks and I was already burned out on tenants and it was storage. So, okay, self-storage. Let me get this straight there’s no one living in the property, there’s no kitchens and there’s no bathrooms and you’re renting someone a box of air. I get it. Yes, I’m in. And then what I had learned about buying small quadplexes with month to month tenants and converting those might rent for a thousand dollars a month. I renovate and I convert it to an Airbnb. It will bring in four to five thousand dollars a month. So it’s a massive forced depreciation that comes when you shoot up the value of the property and you can recapitalize byize, by refinance, with you know, it’s basically the birth strategy for short-term loans.
06:09
So the idea I networked locally. I’m a big extrovert and I believe in the power of relationships and people. So through local networking I met my partners, a father and son team of Eric and Levi Hemingway that had already done one or two conversion projects previously. So we pulled together. I put in money. We got about seven or 800 grand from the doctors that I was doing surgery with, who were my best friends at the hospital. They put in.
06:34
We bought an old Kmart building. We bought the shell. This is the key right. When you flip a house, you don’t make your money when you sell it or when you renovated it. You made your money when it smelled like dogs and cats and you bought it dirt cheap.
06:46
We bought a Kmart that had been empty for 10 years for 1.5 million. It would have cost us six to 7 million just to build the cinder block shell if we tried to do that from the ground up and would have taken us three years. Instead, we bought that building a year later. We had it opened as a climate controlled self-storage facility, bought it for 1.5, put 2.5 million into it, stabilized facilities worth a little over 9 million. Wow, wow, okay, this, this works.
07:10
So it’s half the cost of traditional ground up development. It’s in a third of the time and it includes the cost of the land. Already you think about a Kmart residential density, one, three, five, seven mile radius. Everybody in that town knows where that store is, used to go, buy their home goods there, even though they don’t do that anymore. It makes a great place for those same people to come put their stuff right back in the same building. So we did another one after that. All of them what we call the conversion strategy or the adaptive reuse. If you and I built a self-storage facility from the ground up right now, it’s $120 a square foot and it takes three years and you have to buy the land.
Serena HolmesHost07:47
Now are these in your backyard, so to speak, or are you looking at these Like in other states or in other cities?
Clint HarrisGuest07:53
We started close, but across the Southeast. We’re based in Wilmington, North Carolina, but we have projects across North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia. We had in the last three years two K-marts, three warehouses, two textile mills, a grocery store, a soda bottling facility. Right now we’re doing a boot factory and a carpet factory and we got another one under contract.
Serena HolmesHost08:12
Now, how are you structuring these deals from a capital raising perspective? So obviously you’re one of the GPs you have. It sounds like you’re bringing in you know, your doctor community into your investments and stuff like that. But how many you know? From a syndication standpoint, what does that look like? Are they getting their capital back within two years or three years and like what the returns are like? Can you talk a little bit about that?
Clint HarrisGuest08:33
It’s a great question. It takes a little bit longer because they’re development deals. Like think about it. It takes us a year to build it out and then it’s worth a lot more than when we started. But it’s empty Now it’s going to take another year and a half to two years to fill it up.
Serena HolmesHost08:45
So that’s not that long.
Clint HarrisGuest08:47
In the grand scheme it’s not, but if you’re used to investing into apartment complex with year one cashflow, it’s different. Right, it’s a different. We’re developers. These are development deals. We did first Kmart as a joint venture. After that we started syndication. I raised capital from groups of investors, mostly doctors at first, but now we have about 160 people invested with us. We’re just coming up on 20 million that we’ve raised. We’re sitting on 150 million in assets under management that we put together over the last three and a half years the 150 million in assets under management that we put together over the last three and a half years. The cool thing is that we’ve never had to sell anything because we have that pathway to recapitalization through the refi and after that. So our goal is we want to do the best we can to try to double everybody’s money in five years or less. The good news about that is that it’s tax free because we’re not selling the properties to create a capital gain.
Serena HolmesHost09:32
We do a cash out, refinance.
Clint HarrisGuest09:34
Everybody gets their money back plus a big chunk, and after that everybody stays in. We’re not pushing out the investors. They stay in. Take your money, go buy a boat or move on to the next project, but you’re going to keep that equity and it continues to pay forward. That’s the reason behind the name Nomad Capital. A nomad is somebody who goes where they want, when they want, and does what they want.
Serena HolmesHost09:54
Nice yeah. I love that Now, in terms of some of the challenges that you experienced kind of going into this asset class, can you talk about some of the obstacles that you faced in any lessons that came out of it?
Clint HarrisGuest10:04
Always challenges when you are the developer. So my partners are the GCs. We build these properties out ourselves, right? So we have to. We have to find the right deal. We’ve built an acquisition team that’s looking at 50 to 70 properties a week, to get into one or two a month that we’re going to put a letter of intent on. Every project has significant challenges because these were not built as self-storage. It could be built as a textile mill 80 years ago or as a carpet factory or a soda bottling facility. So there’s always challenges there. Facility so there’s always challenges there.
10:37
In terms of with the investors, the big thing is communication, integrity, honesty, making sure you’re setting expectations ahead of time. And then think about what we just went through. We had the fastest and highest interest rate increase in history. That effectively froze the housing market. Well, what’s the number one driver for self-storage? It’s people moving right, downsizing, displacement yeah, right, now you’ve got 70% of Americans that have an interest rate of less than 5%. Even if they wanted to go downsize to a smaller house for $150,000 less, there’s a good chance their mortgage payment would be higher than what it is now. So there’s challenges that would come along with that, and that’s why I think the value of vertical integration and controlling your price is important. Like we find the buildings ourselves, off-market buildings, build them out at cost plus 12%, we do the property management. You really have to have that top to bottom risk mitigation to control challenging economic headwinds.
Serena HolmesHost11:30
Yeah, I think that’s smart and I think that’s one of the challenges that I’ve seen, like with some of the developers that I’m connected with, where you know they they don’t necessarily have the control and projects that should have been a couple of years or like six years could hit 10 years and you can imagine that the passive investor, if you go in thinking this is like two and a half years max and then you’re hearing it could be 10, like that’s a lot can happen in 10 years, right. So I think that that’s really important just to have that control over what you’re doing. And you can’t maybe control some of those external factors, but at least you’re able to do more than, I guess, the average company.
Clint HarrisGuest12:03
Yeah, exactly, you nailed it.
Serena HolmesHost12:05
Now, what would you say is something that you are most proud of.
Clint HarrisGuest12:10
The team that we built is the thing I’m most proud of. I’m one of four general partners and then we have 16 employees and this started with a couple guys around a card table a couple years ago. So the team and the culture that we built is something that people on the outside can’t see, but it’s the biggest thing that I’m proud of. And also we start off all of our deals as 506B friends and family deals and then we convert them to 506C accredited deals once we hit our limit of 35 investors. The reason we do that is because we want to make place for, obviously, our friends and family, but we make a space for our employees to invest into the deals.
12:45
So, like our project manager, our director of construction and the site supervisors are invested into these deals with six figures or more, and they’re in their twenties sometimes, and so I see these guys get super excited when they find screws for less than one cent a piece. And I love seeing that alignment of yes, they care, because it’s our job to care, to take care of our investors, and we’re always going to protect the asset first, the investor second and ourselves third, in that order. But I love seeing the culture and the excitement that they get out of it, because they’re invested in this too and they’re part of that. So that’s the biggest thing. And then the ability to continue to scale through challenging times without having to sell any of our properties.
Serena HolmesHost13:24
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s huge because I definitely have seen a lot of chaos, specifically in my real estate investing community and it’s been really sad to see some of the things that have been happening. And you know there’s a lot of things I think could have been done differently to maybe mitigate some of those challenges. But yeah, it’s. I think that’s a huge testament to the work that you’re doing. On that note, we’re just going to take a really brief break for a word from our sponsors and we’ll be right back. Hey everybody, Welcome back to Inspired to Invest. I’ve got Clint Harris here from Nomad Capital and he’s talking about how he’s capitalized on self-storage units, specifically turning big box stores like Kmart’s or bottling factories into self-storage units, and almost sounds like 10x-ing the value in a lot of ways. Now, one thing I always like to ask my guests is what’s one of the craziest things that you’ve experienced since you’ve been a real estate investor like to ask my guests is what’s?
Clint HarrisGuest14:14
one of the craziest things that you’ve experienced since you’ve been a real estate investor. Oh man, you know? I think the one thing that I would say is that we’ve had some crazy things that have happened with these larger projects, but a lot of times, the crazier things have happened on smaller projects, and that lesson translates right Timeline of construction. I had a full renovation going on in 2015 and the project got flooded out, but not just that project half of the city got flooded out, and so not only did it put my timeline behind on my project, every contractor all of a sudden was dealing with their own family problems and people disappeared for months and months.
14:46
The importance of things like interest reserves, carrying costs and things like that. I’m pretty cavalier with my investments. That I did as a younger man. Once you get to the point of syndication, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and I am raising millions or tens of million dollars from other people that are relying on us with their money, that is basically a store of their life energy. We have a responsibility there that’s higher than just me taking care of my money.
15:13
So the importance of having a track record and having partners with a long track record of realizing that, yeah, we can make mistakes on our own with smaller projects Once you start getting into bigger projects. It’s the same fundamentals but there’s a lot more zeros involved, and the importance of things like third-party feasibility studies and using outside data to project future success. But also realize that we use the previous 10 years of self-storage rental data to project the next few years. And then we had an absolutely frozen housing market and the highest and fastest interest rate increase in history. It’s never the things that you see coming to get you. It’s the things that you don’t see coming, and your job especially with other people’s store of life energy involved is to prepare for the things that don’t seem like they’re possible and happening.
Serena HolmesHost16:01
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that’s where you know you’ve got to think of your exit strategy, but think of like five different models of that same exit strategy and just being able to mitigate through those challenges. Now, in terms of things like education and advice, how would you say you learned to kind of go through some of these things and what would you say is some of the best advice?
Clint HarrisGuest16:22
that you’ve received as you’ve been growing and scaling. I think one thing that’s really important is that a lot of people investors, as you’re asking yourself questions about what you should do next and what you should go, what direction you should head. In A lot of the times, the answer is I don’t know. I don’t know what implies ambiguity? In my opinion, ambiguity is just a lack of knowledge, and lack of knowledge implies a lack of education, and education in 2024 is free, and I used to think that you know.
16:45
If you are in the car, I believe that you should be listening to podcasts. I’m a firm believer of that. That’s what I used to say all the time. Now, I believe, no matter what it is or what your credentials, if you really really want to learn about something, you should think about starting a podcast. Right? I host, a co-host, a podcast and I’ve got, you know, 80 episodes in of people that are unbelievably brilliant, people that are now willing to sit down and give me 45 minutes to an hour of their condensed life experience, when previously they wouldn’t give me the time of day to go to lunch. And I’ve been able to connect with people like John Hewitt, the founder of Jackson Hewitt tax service and the founder of Liberty, which sold them for a combined billion dollars, got to go have dinner with them.
17:25
Like the ability to network through education, it doesn’t need to just be a one-way street. Yes, you should consume content, because the person you are right now is the person you’re going to be 10 years from now the exception of the places you go, the people you meet and the content you consume. But you can be aggressive about that and think about starting a podcast. And I think it’s important for people to know about the law of a hundred hours. The law of a hundred hours says, if you spend a hundred hours focusing on one thing that’s important to you, you’re going to know more about that than 90% of the population. And 100 hours is only 18 minutes a day in the car for a year. Yeah, I think we all have that time. It just depends on how you want to spend it and if you want to invest it into your family and your legacy.
Serena HolmesHost18:05
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s really powerful and I feel like I’m around the same. I’ve recorded around 90 episodes. I’m about to release 75 next week. So, yeah, just the things that I’ve learned and the ideas and the concepts and things that you can take advantage of that. You know, if you look at something, it might start to look different if you look at it a different way, right? So I find that that’s been one of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most is just getting to know people you know all across Canada, but also into the United States, that I never would have connected with otherwise. Now, in terms of what’s next for you, obviously you’ve tackled some pretty significant projects. Do you have a particular dollar figure in mind or is there something you know that you’re specifically after to give you the quality of life that you want or the income that you want?
Clint HarrisGuest18:45
Yeah, so money is. It’s a part of it, but obviously I don’t think money’s that important. I don’t want to die with a bunch of things. I want to die with a giant stack of pictures of things I did with people that I love, in beautiful places, and now money needs to be part of that because it’s a small part of the freedom of purpose, as long as it also comes with time and location independence.
19:04
For us, that dollar figure is tied to our employees, the culture we’re creating and our investors. So we’re at 150 million in assets under management right now. We’d love to do six to eight deals a year. Our next deal is going to be the biggest deal that we’ve done by far, and our goal over the next two years is to get to 300 million and then 500 million in over a period of 10 years, starting from three years ago, to get to a billion in assets under management. I’m sure along the way we’re going to sell some of those, but the idea is that we’re ending this with a portfolio of properties that gives us freedom of purpose, where we can focus on building a legacy for our family, where they’re not spending their lives chasing more money, that we can focus on things that have a little bit bigger significance than just dollars.
Serena HolmesHost19:48
Yeah, no, I love that. Now how would you say real estate investing has really changed your life up until this point in time?
Clint HarrisGuest19:57
say that again. Which part of it did you say?
Serena HolmesHost19:59
How would you say real estate investing has already changed your life since you went from you know medical sales to building out these self-storage units.
Clint HarrisGuest20:06
So I’ve been thinking about this recently and I think I have an answer for this. So in medical sales I was the guy that a lot of these cardiologists, surgeons and electrophysiologists rely on to go into surgery and even though I got three weeks off a year to go on vacation, I felt guilty taking that because these people we were in the trenches together. I was a very small piece of a big machine saving lives and I felt importance with that and also I felt pressure from my physicians to be there for them, the staff and the patients to support that. So I’ve got two boys, five years old and 18 months old, and even though I got those three weeks a year and I was on call for a lot of weekends, I really had about one week a year dedicated phone off, family time, right. So my five-year-old, let’s say he’s leaving the house at 18. That’s 13 more years for a total of 13 weeks. That it’s really dedicated. You know nothing else distracting us, right? And I’ve got, you know, 15 years, 16 with the younger, right. So what’s the median there? Call it 14 weeks, really that I get time with those boys. Now it’s starting in 2026.
21:15
The plan is for the general partners to take a couple months off a year in between projects, and I want to. We live on an island. It’s not the richest place around, but I grew up in a very poor family. I have concerns about raising my sons around a lot of money, so I want to travel to places that create empathy and apathy and understanding of people and do some mission work and things like that.
21:36
And if I’m talking about, instead of one week a year for the next 14 years, I can take 14 weeks a year in that same period of time. It’s literally a 10 X multiplier on the dedicated amount of time that I get to spend with my kids and yes, that time is important, but if I leave my boys money, history shows that three generations later the money’s probably gone and my family’s probably bad people. If I’m able to impart a sense of value and community and affecting the people around you in a positive way and a family constitution and a family foundation and the amount of time I spend with them is 10x more than it would have been, that probably dictates what they think their relationship with their sons and grandsons looks like as a normal relationship. That, I think, gives a possibility of six, seven, eight generations later. Nobody said my name for 200 years at that point. Probably a better chance that they’re better people creating wealth and value for themselves in their community.
Serena HolmesHost22:37
Yeah, I love that. I mean, that’s one thing where, when I had my own business, I ran an event services agency for 18 years and I kind of determined my success when I was actually able to free myself from being chained to the business. So I remember the first year I had like a month’s vacation, I was like, oh my gosh, like you know, the first time in 10 years. To me that was such a testament to the work and the business that I was building.
22:59
But I believe the same thing I have an almost five-year-old and you know, your priorities really shift when you have a little person that you’re trying to mold and craft into being a good person and a good human and you want to spend that time with them. Right, I think when we were growing up, we were just kind of there, like when I I don’t know what your family was like, but my parents said you’re just kind of there with them where I feel like things have really changed and just how people perceive families and what’s really fulfillment has really changed. So I think that’s really powerful. Now I always like to ask people since the name of this podcast is inspired to invest if they have a particular quote that motivates or inspires them. So do you have one that you would want to share?
Clint HarrisGuest23:35
Yeah, it’s just from my partner. He always talks about how risk is a muscle. My partners are father and son. Team of Eric and Levi Hemingway. My partner built his first cell storage in 2006. And then, when the market crashed in 08, he and his wife and their five kids bought a 36-foot catamaran sailboat sight unseen in Greece and ended up sailing for three and a half years waiting for the economy to turn, even stopped and had a kid in Jerusalem and then kept sailing, then sailed across the Mediterranean and then all the way across the.
24:05
Atlantic back to Wilmington and started building and built everything up from there. And one thing he always says is in, in, in medic. I left medical sales in 2022 to do this full time. Risk is a muscle and the more that you work that, the stronger it gets. And surrounding yourself by like-minded people where you’re willing to challenge each other and lean on each other for your deficiencies, I think that that’s that’s really the key and that’s one of the reasons I feel comfortable failing fast, because I’ve got the community of people around me that I didn’t come from a real estate background. So if we want to hit a billion dollars in valuation, it’s not going to happen by itself and it’s going to require some effort and we better build up those risk muscles.
Serena HolmesHost24:46
Yeah, I love that. Now, for anyone that wants to get in touch with you to learn more about your opportunities, what’s the best way for them to connect?
Clint HarrisGuest24:52
The best way is you can go to our website, nomadcapitalus. You can schedule a call there or, if you want to email me directly, clint at nomadcapitalus. I’m happy to talk to anybody about short-term rentals, everything I did wrong, building a property management company, obviously syndication or self-storage so happy to connect and help any way I can.
Serena HolmesHost25:11
Awesome. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day today. Of course, for anyone that is watching or listening, we appreciate your time and commitment as well. Make sure that you have liked comment and subscribe below if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you’re following along in social at Inspired to Invest podcast. And remember, when you invest in yourself, the sky’s the limit. Thanks again.