Single No More: Making the Move to Multifamily

Single No More: Making the Move to Multifamily

By Cynthia Trammell

For a lot of real estate investors, single family is where it starts.

You buy a house. Maybe you flip it. Maybe you keep it as a rental. Along the way, you learn contractors, tenants, lenders, repairs, negotiations, and all the things that come with owning real estate. Then one day you look at multifamily and wonder, could I really do that?

Here is what I tell people all the time: you already have 70% of the skills you need.

If you have owned rentals, managed renovations, worked through financing, dealt with tenants, or solved problems when something did not go as planned, you are not starting over. You may actually be starting further ahead than I did.

I did not come into multifamily with years of residential real estate experience. Other than owning a commercial building, I had not built a portfolio of single family rentals. My first multifamily property was a 16-unit in Oklahoma. I had to learn commercial brokers, rent rolls, different financing, operations, and a different way of looking at the numbers.

What I did have were skills from business and life. I knew how to solve problems, work with people, make decisions, and keep moving when things did not go exactly as planned. What I really needed was the other 30%.

Too many people convince themselves they need absolute certainty before they move. Waiting until you know exactly what to do can become another form of procrastination. At some point, more research simply delays the moment when you have to decide.

Investor and educator J Scott has said that roughly 96% of the people he meets in real estate investing have never done a deal. Plenty of people watch videos, attend meetings, study markets, and talk about real estate. But they never make the offer.

Failure does not end nearly as many dreams as hesitation does. Failure means you stepped onto the field. Doubt can keep you standing on the sidelines forever.

Small multifamily can be the bridge.

A 6-unit, 12-unit, 16-unit, or 30-unit property can create enough scale for the income to matter without building a business so large that it swallows the life you were trying to improve. You can build passive income and equity while staying close enough to understand what you own.

And that income can change more than your bank account.

Maybe you take the trip without calculating what you have to give up to pay for it. Maybe you spend a little more on dinner with your family without that guilty voice asking whether you should have saved the money instead. Over time, real estate can give you more freedom to make decisions based on the life you want and less on what your next paycheck allows.

That is why small multifamily can become the destination. Not because you stopped thinking bigger, but because you got clearer about what bigger means: more freedom, more choices, more control over your time, and assets your family can benefit from long after you bought the first property.

That is legacy.

Real estate is not impressive because of the number of doors you own. It becomes meaningful because of what those doors allow you to do with your life.

That is part of what I’ll be talking about at AZREIA, because the move into multifamily is not really about getting more doors. It is about what those doors can make possible in your life.

Then comes the part that matters most: execute.

Call the broker. Look at the financials. Underwrite the property. Build your team. Make the offer when the numbers make sense. Your first offer may get rejected. Mine have. Make another one.

Confidence rarely arrives first. More often, it grows because you moved before you felt completely ready.

You already have 70%.

The life you want five years from now is being built by the decisions you are willing to make today.