Jonathan Twombly 10:09
It was, you know, it was when I saw I was doing litigation by and which is a really unusual career path from like litigation to being an entrepreneur. I don’t think I’ve met another litigator, there are lots of corporate guys, but not many litigators. But then when, when I started out, and all I was doing was kind of writing briefs and I was like, very deep into like the intellectual aspects of law that I enjoyed, but I’m doing like appellate work. But after about my third year, I started getting more heavily involved in just the day to day, mind-numbing, like, back-and-forth petty bs of litigation, right and adding with other opposing counsel that’s sitting with opposing counsel, writing stupid letters back and forth, accusing each other stuff, writing letters to the judge accusing the other side of stuff, and then just old, like them a new show getting ready for trial and like keeping track of documents. It’s just like, it was horrible. And it’s just horrible and like, interminable hours, right? I mean, I was working late nights and weekends, and I had no time to myself. It was just a terrible grind and a terrible life. So I got really bored of that. But I also one of the things that was constantly on my mind in those days was how entrepreneurial, big law firm life was. Right? And so yeah, all I want to do is like, be allowed to have a thought that nobody had before. Like, I don’t know, if you’re if you’re like how familiar listeners are with like litigation, but when you’re writing briefs, we have to cite a source for everything, right? So you can’t make an argument without there being like, basically somebody who’s who thought it before that you can rely on right and, and that was making me crazy. It’s like, Man, I just want to be in a position where, you know, I can look at the world and say like, wow, there are all these widgets out there. But nobody’s ever made one that was that’s green. I’m gonna make the green widget right? And yeah, like, you can’t do that as a lawyer, and it was just really eating at me. So I think that’s why I had that first venture with my brother just to kind of scratch that that itch. And yeah, you know, I didn’t think I was at that point would ever go into business for myself. But I definitely wanted to be like, on the business side of things where I could just create something, and just not be fighting with people for a living.
John Corcoran 12:41
Yeah, I know, the feeling for sure. I went through this kind of the same motions. And so, like many very people who have excelled at academics, as you did haven’t gone to Harvard and Columbia, you went back to school, and you studied for a while to get your Ph.D. And it was connected to your love of Japan had a lifelong love for Japan. Where did that come from?
Jonathan Twombly 13:07
The love of Japan? Yeah, the interest in Japan. So that’s kind of a roundabout; most of my life is happens in the sort of roundabout stories, right? So when I was in college, there was the height of the Japanese bubble. And just as an aside, when I saw the last few years, and I saw everybody studying Chinese, I always sort of laughed about it, because I was like, I’ve been through this before. So when I was in college, it was the height of the Japanese bubble. And like, everybody was studying Japanese, because they all thought like, Oh, this is the key to like, future riches. Right. And so one of the people who was studying Japanese was my girlfriend at the time. Right. And so she, during one of the summer breaks, went to Japan for the summer. And I was stuck back in New Jersey, where I grew up with some crappy summer job. And it was weird, like writing letters to each other. And every once in a while I, like I call her up and have, like, $100 phone bill to Japan, and my mom would get pissed at me. And my girlfriend was saying stuff like, I don’t know what’s good, what you’re gonna do when we graduate, but I’m going back to Japan, right? So I thought, well, you know, I think I probably want to take a break. After college, I don’t want to go straight to any kind of graduate school. So why don’t I go to Japan with my girlfriend? So then just being very practical-minded as like, well, I better start studying Japanese. And I started studying Japanese in my junior college, and just really liked it. And then I was an American history major. I had no connection with Japan whatsoever. I just really liked it and then when it came time to graduate, I still didn’t want to go back to straight into school. Of course, my girlfriend and I had broken off you know naturally and but I kept on studying it anyway. And then I thought like, what am I going to do now when I graduate like you If I go to Japan and learn Japanese, well, maybe that’ll be good for my career somehow, someday. So I went to Japan, I thought it’d be there for a year, I wound up being there for three years, and then decided he’s got a job there. I did, I got, I got three jobs. I got three jobs there before I left, so I went in, I literally I wrote to every day used to have this book at Harvard, it was the hump the Harvard Alumni alumni directory, they had like the address of every single living Harvard graduate in it. And I went, and I found every single one of them, who was like, work in a in a law firm in Japan, I wrote them, I sent them all the same letter. And somebody called me back and said, Hey, we have a job for you, if you want to start a year from now. And then I just got lucky. And through the Japanese Department at Harvard, I got like a summer internship, and then a one-year position, working a, at a magazine in Tokyo. And then I had that, that other job starting sort of when I finished that, so basically had like, three jobs lined up when I got there.
John Corcoran 16:12
Yeah, but that must have been an adventure. So after you flush flushing forward a little bit, you end up 2010 2011, that kind of time period, we have the financial crisis, and you actually end up losing your job practicing law. I think you’re in New York City at this point. What then led you into real estate around that time?
Jonathan Twombly 16:38
Yeah, so for the I had had an interest in real estate, for some time, just as, you know, like, an investment. And it seemed like something easy to do. And you kind of saw this, people, especially, you know, before the financial crisis, everybody was buying houses and flipping houses and stuff like that, and it, you know, watching HGTV and it all seems so easy, and certainly more fun than being a lawyer. And I had this idea that I wanted to go work for some kind of, you know, institutional real estate company. And then, so I was sort of thinking of that, on the one hand, then on the other hand, like after 2008 2009, the work at my firm, really dried up, right, and I was sitting around with nothing to do. And for some reason, they kept me on for two years when I had very little to do. But during that two-year period, where it was really I just, you know, didn’t have a full plate, I spent a lot of my downtime, just looking online and real estate, trying to figure out like, you know, how much real estate would I have to buy to replace my income, and it didn’t look right, trying to like, buy like one house at a time where I’d make, you know, like, Rich Dad Poor Dad style, like you’re clearing $1,000 a year on this property, it’s like, okay, that means I gotta buy 200 of these, you know, and they’re gonna cost me $200,000 Each, like, how am I ever going to do that? And so, so, but that’s kind of what I was, what I was going through. And when it became clear to me that I was probably going to get fired. For because I had no work. I started doing a lot of networking. And then I started meeting people who were in real estate, and just talking to him trying to figure out like, how could I break into this? How can I break into this and kind of at the all at the same time, like a confidence that if different things happen, so I did get terminated, but they gave me like a really nice severance severance package. So I had like, for six months of severance to kind of figure out what I wanted to do. I was talking with people in the real estate space, who were saying stuff to me, like, you know, you got a great resume, and you know, great background and all this kind of stuff. But let’s be honest, like, we just had this financial crisis, they’re, they’re like, 10,000 guys on the street who have been doing this for 20 years, we’re all looking for jobs. Like you’re, you’re not going to get hired. What you know, as a career changer, yeah. When these guys with like real experience are looking for jobs. So the only way you’re gonna break into this business is if somebody wants to partner with you. Then I met somebody who was like, Hey, I’m starting a real estate investment business. Would you like to partner with me? And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to partner with you. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know if you’re any good at this. So what I decided to do was do due diligence on her by trotting her around a bunch of my, like, wealthy, more financially sophisticated friends. And the upshot of that of letting her like pitch them on what we were doing was that a bunch of them said, Hey, Jonathan, if you decide to partner up with her, I will give you money to invest. And it was like real money. It was isn’t like, I’ll give you 50,000 bucks, I had a couple of people say I’ll give you a million dollars to invest if you do this. But so I was like, Okay, I’ve got someone asking me to be a partner, somebody else said, The only way I’m gonna break in is if I become partners with somebody, and then two people offered me a million dollars to invest, I probably should do this. So so that’s how I got started, we formed, we formed a business, we started looking for deals. So that was a funny story. Like, I just mean, like, lack of communication, right? Not knowing what you’re getting into. I just assumed because like my head, because I’m living here in New York City, like the New York City conversation for kind of like, real estate investors on this kind of personal level, like sort of retail level as I think of it now, that conversation was all about, like, you’re gonna buy a brownstone and a gentrifying neighborhood, and you’re gonna collect, get it by a cheap and you’re gonna sell expensive and, you know, like, you’re gonna flip it or something like that. That’s what I thought we were getting into. That wasn’t what I was getting into at all. She was like, no, no, we’re gonna go buy, you know, 100 unit apartments down and like, Louisiana. And I was like, what, like, how do you how does a person buy 100 unit property? Like, that’s crazy. But on the one hand, it turned out that 100-unit property in Louisiana at the time cost about the same as a brownstone in Brooklyn, right. And so that, so that, that made it a lot easier, but but basically learned the business that I’m in now, which is a, what we call it real estate, syndication, what it is, is essentially, you know, you pull a bunch of investor money together, create a fund, but it’s a fund for only one property. Right. So each property has its own set of investors in a fund, you buy the property, do whatever your business plan is, I mean, your business plan might just be hold it, right, if it doesn’t really need work, or if it needs a lot of work, you fix it up, increase the value, and then hold it and then eventually sell it. So but whatever, whatever the business plan is, the structure of it is, you’ve got your general partners who are doing all the work, you’ve got your limited partners to put in the money and get the profits. And, you know, you you identify a property and hold it for whatever holding period you’ve, you know, plan to, and then eventually sell it and get everybody’s money back. And hopefully, you know, make them a profit. So on a really basic level.
John Corcoran 22:23
And the challenge with your previous business, the Boston and common business was that you weren’t able to figure out a business model that was profitable, that that supported you. Did you find with this new endeavor, that you were able to support yourself shortly after that.
Jonathan Twombly 22:41
So it did take a while, because the the issue with that business is for this business, I should say when you’re getting into it. It’s it’s it’s I mean, as a general matter, it’s hard to find good deals. But as when you’re starting out, it’s especially hard to find good deals, because you you don’t have to look for Well, no, it’s less. I mean, that’s part of it, you don’t know what you’re doing is part of it. But But another part of it is that you have to gain the trust of the broker community. And for larger properties, and you kind of, you know, multifamily properties that are, you know, I’d say anything more than, say 20 units is going to be handled by a commercial broker and the commercial brokers. There’s even for like a big city like New York does. And we were down in Louisiana, right? It’s a very small number of people. It’s a very small community. And they’re, they’re, they’re very wary of dealing with people who are gonna waste their time. Yeah, it’s so it’s really important to them, that you close because their reputation is on the line with with their clients, or the sellers. Yeah. And they’re also you know, oftentimes, you know, the last few years where there’s been like so much activity, those guys have made a lot of money. But when I was starting out, it was a soft market and commission that they might get on a property that’d be that could be the only commission they were going to get in a hole in that year. And it would be enough for them to live on for the year. But that that was it. So they were really wary about trusting anybody who was new or didn’t seem like they could close.
John Corcoran 24:14
So this kind of has the makings of like a movie like big city slicker. New York City lawyer flies down to Louisiana to try and you know, convince them to buy this. Let’s sell that to you, you know, this 100-unit apartment building, when you’ve never done it before. Do you recall like what you did to try and win these people over? You know, when I imagined you didn’t have a connection to Louisiana at the time?
Jonathan Twombly 24:37
Well, my partner did. That’s why we Okay, so she and her husband own some property there already. Okay, and that was why but so the reason that I was I was like, why aren’t you working with your husband? And she’s like, my husband, he’s got money. He’s, he’s happy. He doesn’t need to work. But I want to build something. I’m young. I’m young. I don’t want to build something that my partner my husband won’t do with me. So I need a partner. So that was that was kind of how we connected to she already knew some of the brokers down there and stuff. So we did have a little bit of like an end that it helped that they had property already. So there was like we kind of borrowed their legitimacy a bit, to at least get us talking with the brokers right. So that yeah, that helped.
John Corcoran 25:17
Yeah, yeah. Now, eventually, this becomes Two Bridges Asset Management for you. You manage a number of different properties and flash forwarding over many years here. But I recall talking to you a couple of years ago, and I can’t remember what year this was, but didn’t you cut sell off your entire portfolio at some point?
Jonathan Twombly 25:38
I did. So here’s sort of what happened. So my that first partner and I, we went our separate ways, because of like, We chased a bunch of deals in Louisiana, it was a bad lending environment, we, we were in contract and a couple of deals, that lenders backed out on us, and we couldn’t find a lender to replace them. It was really kind of a searing experience, lost a bunch of money, and decided when it was all over to just kind of part ways and go do our own thing. Then, you know, I was out with one of my investors, one of the guys who I had originally kind of consulted when I was thinking about getting into this, and I was like, you know, we went out to dinner, I was like, Dude, I might have to go back to practicing law. And he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on their partner, you know, I will back you in a venture, if you if you want to do this, right. So we wound up partnering, he gave me some seed capital. So I could start, I could actually make some money while I was building the business. And that was how I actually started getting some real traction, then I switched markets, I went down to the Carolinas, I kind of was able to worm my way into the broker community through some personal friends, which is a great way to do it. And actually, and then I got, then I started being able to buy property, right. So I bought a built-up portfolio of apartments down in South Carolina. And we held them for a number of years, and then, in 2019, I sold the whole portfolio. Because at that time, it’s hard to remember back right now because we’ve had COVID. And we had that, and especially in the property business with low-interest rates, we had this property boom. But in 2019, the property cycle had been going on for a long time. And it is already the like, the longest expansion in the history of the real estate market had been going on for 10 years, you know, there was a pretty common consensus that it was running out of steam. And a few people remember this, but there was kind of like, recession on the horizon, you know, they were talking about and there’s later on people who said, Yeah, we actually did enter a recession and the beginning of 2020, just nobody noticed, because COVID happened, and then all the craziness. So I looked at the environment. And I was like, you know, I think it’s time to get out of these properties. We essentially were offered more money for them out of the blue cold call by a broker, who asked if I would sell. I gave him a number that was designed to make him go away. Because I was designed to be a stupid number. And then he came back and it’s like, our clients will die. We’ll do that.
John Corcoran 28:23
So him Why didn’t I say hi? Or number?
Jonathan Twombly 28:26
Exactly, I should have said, no. She should have said higher than that. But the, you know, we, so we exited those properties, we doubled everybody’s money, everybody was happy. And then I kind of like, set kind of focus on my coaching program for a while, kind of partnered with other people on deals.
John Corcoran 28:50
You eventually decide to buy a small motel, kind of a rundown motel in upstate New York, I want to hear about that. And I also want to hear about, you know, you’ve gone from New Orleans to Carolinas to New York, and how do you how have you managed to evaluate these other opportunities in other markets that where you don’t live there? And maybe you don’t know the, you know, the local flavor, you don’t have the you know, don’t understand the local environment or the geography or anything like that. How do you evaluate them?
Jonathan Twombly 29:22
So Louisiana was just I was just sort of dragged into that and just relying on my former partners experience to that market. The Carolinas is a little more intentional. And the way that I picked that market was, you know, in 2012, the census data came out from 2010 census. And I basically sorted all of that data and basically sorted it into the, the MSA is that the Metropolitan City metropolitan statistical areas that had population growth that was higher than the national average, and that we’re on East Coast. And because I didn’t want to, one of the things I learned about doing business in Louisiana was that flying to Louisiana and Texas from New York takes a really long time. So like, you’re talking about like to get there for what, it’s three days for one meeting, right? You know, between there and back. So I was like, I don’t want to do that anymore. There’s lots of opportunity. Well look at the Carolinas, and look how fast they’re growing. Especially a couple of places that were like, sort of off the radar. Everybody was looking at Charleston saying, Oh, look what’s happening in Charleston or Charlotte. But what I noticed was that Greenville, which now is on most people’s radars, was growing really fast. And when I went down to check it out, I was like, Man, I really like what’s happening in this city. So I started just focusing on that market, and just really kind of learning that market and talking to brokers, talking to property managers getting a feel for what was going on there. And then was able to kind of break through with some brokers and find my first deal. And the kind of nature of this business is, it takes you a long time, as I was saying before, to like, get the broker community warmed up, you know, get them to take you seriously. But as soon as you buy a property, then all of a sudden, they’re all like, coming to you, right, because now he’s legit. So, so I was able to do a bunch of deals relatively quickly after that first one. But
John Corcoran 31:21
in what about upstate New York, other than you live in New York? Did you have any connections to the area? Or did you come to the same conclusion that it was a high-growth area?
Jonathan Twombly 31:29
No, it’s definitely not a hydrotherapy. So that was, you know, that was really more of an opportunistic thing. So the way that that came about was, we had bought, you know, many others we bought a COVID house in upstate New York, right? And, and basically, in the the that we would go to every summer, I find the I’ve been after my wife to buy a house up there. For years, she never wanted to she’s like, I don’t want to have a second house too much work, whatever. When we went up there, the first summer of COVID. And like, we got out of our apartment in New York for the first time, like we had some fresh air and room to spread out. My wife was like, we’re buying a house. So I was like, Thank God like finally. So. So we bought a house up there. And in order to get to this house, we would have to pass by this old motel. And it was in the spectacular location overlooking Seneca Lake, which is one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. It’s like the wine wine region. That’s sort of like, it’s like the East Coast. Sonoma Valley. Right. And yeah, it’s, every time we pass this hotel, we would have the same conversation, which was, wow, look, what a shame. Look at this hotel in this amazing location. Somebody ought to do something about this. It’s, you know, I wish somebody would fix it up. So one day I was, I had this idea that if I started doing business, upstate, I could get my wife would let me spend more time there. So I started looking for properties to buy up in upstate New York, and I came across this hotel for sale. It wasn’t
John Corcoran 33:08
listed, or anything. Okay, no, no,
Jonathan Twombly 33:10
it was listed for sale. And it had been on sale, they put it up for sale in the middle of COVID. You know, they it sat on the market for a year and sort of price cut, price cut, price cut, price cut. And I was like, Well, you know what, maybe I ought to do this, right. So I went and through a business partner of mine, that I had done some some capital raising with for like, cannabis company and some some other things. You know, I asked him like, Hey, do you know anybody who is in the hotel business? And she said, as a matter of fact, my my wife’s cousin is a is a hotel, Hotel Management guy, you should talk to him. So talk with same as shift Barbu. We, we talked, I showed him the hotel I kind of showed him, you know, to get his thoughts on it. And she was like, Yeah, I think this is an interesting opportunity. So I went to just one investor who I thought might be interested, and said, Hey, look, we have this opportunity. What do you think, you know, this is what we think we can do with this hotel. This is the pro forma. And he was like, okay, yeah, I’ll do it. So we bought that hotel. And we, we operate it for the rest of the season. And then we shut it down at the end of the season and went into renovation mode. And we’re here today is what August 11. We’re, we’re literally like the very final finishing touches are going on this week. We’ve been open for the whole summer, but just like we opened as we were continuing to renovate. Yeah. Now we’re basically done. And what
John Corcoran 34:45
were some of the differences for you in you know, operating and in buying a motel versus, you know, apartment building.
Jonathan Twombly 34:56
Well, so there are a number of differences. You know, for one thing, even though a lot of doing the apartment building is is rehabbing them and repositioning them, I mean, depending on what your strategy is, but that’s a fairly common strategy right to, to buy an older property and fix it up or even something, it’s not so old, but just that, you know, needs updating neglect this, it’s unnecessarily neglected, it’s just out of date, like maybe, maybe the kitchens are 15 years out of date. And so you bring them, you know, renters want modern news. So you, you update them to the, whatever the standard is today, and you raise the rents like, that’s the, that’s the play in a hotel, but there’s not, but it’s also very generic, right, the stuff that you do with most apartment buildings is kind of like the same, pat the same basic package, or the same basic thing you’re doing, like, you’re replacing the countertops and the flooring, you’re putting in new appliances, you fix up the bathroom, and it’s it’s all sort of like looks the same. And all the apartments are always very generic, because people want to come in and like put their own touches on it, right. So there’s no, there’s not really a design involved. The hotel was like, heavily, heavily designed, like, there’s a lot of design involved in like rebranding does, you know, Logos design, what we’re going to do are reconfiguring rooms. This also this hotel had a had a hotel, a site, a restaurant and a bar, as well. So I really liked that whole process of redesigning that hotel, it’s just much, it’s just really fun and exciting and thought-provoking. And you’re really thinking about, it’s very different thought process, because with apartment buildings, the the kind of consensus is like a everybody needs a place to live, and be there’s a housing shortage. So people are going to come unless it’s a real dump by didn’t even then people may live there, because they have no other choice. So you’re kind of like, as a landlord, you have a lot of market power today, right? In the hotel business, it’s very different. It’s like, you got to convince people to come here. And then you got to convince them to want to come back, right? Because if you don’t come back, like you’re, you’re out of business, so you have to create a guest experience. It’s not like, hey, you know, too bad. You guys have no choice, you gotta live in our building. It’s like, hey, you know, you welcome like, come on, like, have a good time. Like, I’ll be like the beds, you know, the whole thing. So a lot of effort went into the design of the hotel and the end of the rehab of the hotel. And if I say so myself, we did a wonderful job on it. And it’s great. I mean, also, working in a small town is very different to because they’re very excited for us to be there. The people, you know, the folks in town also really wanted this place to be fixed up. And so we’ve gotten a lot of really positive feedback from, you know, people in town just about, you know, what a great job we’ve done, like, and just that it’s, you know, the Chamber of Commerce is happy, because it’s like, there was one hotel downtown. And they were like, Oh, this is great, because now there’s another good place in town for people to stay. Yeah. So yeah, it’s just, it’s just been really fun.
John Corcoran 38:10
And did you I assume you’re not operating the restaurant yourself? I assume you had to find a tenant for that. So that’s their animal.
Jonathan Twombly 38:17
So well, here’s actually I wanted to do something else I want to say in response to the previous question is, how is it different? The other thing that I did differently this time, and I think smarter, was I didn’t try to do everything myself, right. So I went and really did more of a like, right button, right seats and kind of focus on the thing I’m good at and find somebody else who’s good at what I’m not good at. So shiv is a great operator, right? And he really understands hotel operations, he really understands, you know, the process of rehabbing a hotel, he’s done 10 or 12 of them before this one that we did together. You know, my skill set is in finding the deals, putting the deals together, structuring the deals, raising the capital, right for for the deals, and also, to some extent, kind of having the vision of what it should look like when it’s done. But execution is not what interests me, right? I like, I like having the big picture. And Shiva is great at taking care of all the details and kind of making the vision happen. So it’s a really great partnership, which I didn’t have when I was doing multifamily, because I was sort of trying to do everything. And so that was like a lesson I learned from like, what I was doing in multifamily that I did wrong, that that now I did right. And now the thing that’s kind of, for me very high, maybe most entrepreneurs like had this eye-opening moment, like 20 years ago. I’m slow. Like I just suddenly I had I see a pathway to scale because like my eyes have been opened about. Okay, well I can actually grow this business much faster if I’m not trying to do it all myself. If I’ve got other people You know, doing the stuff that I don’t like to do, then I can focus on what I like, they can focus on what they like. And together, we can move the whole thing faster. So that for me, that was like a big aha moment. Right? So
John Corcoran 40:12
yeah, and about the restaurant, you were gonna say,
Jonathan Twombly 40:15
the restaurants. So we’re operating the restaurant ourselves. So we, you know, we’re not cooking, obviously. But you know, we, we hired a chef. And, you know, we have a restaurant manager. So, yeah,
John Corcoran 40:25
yeah, cuz that’s a whole nother animal, too, right, especially compared to the apartment building, now running in a restaurant.
Jonathan Twombly 40:30
Yeah. And we had to go through the whole liquor license process in New York. And, you know, all of these things that we kind of, didn’t really anticipate, because you know what, originally when we underwrote the hotel, we did plan to lease it out to somebody. And then we kind of realized that we wanted to control what was in the restaurant, we didn’t want to just have some tenant there who maybe was at cross purposes with us maybe had a different vision for what the restaurant should be. We wanted to control what it was. So fortunately, we actually hired the so when we bought the hotel, we bought it from a family that had owned it for 60 years, or whatever. We actually hired as the manager, the day to day manager of the hotel, the daughter of the family who had been running the restaurant that had been in job before, so we kept her on. So she obviously has restaurant running experience. And so that that made that piece of it a lot smoother.
John Corcoran 41:29
Yeah, helps with that institutional knowledge. We’re almost out of time. You mentioned you have a coaching program called the apartment investors cloud. Tell us about that.
Jonathan Twombly 41:38
Yeah, so that that one of the things I sort of discovered along the way was that there are a lot of people who want to learn how to buy apartment buildings themselves, either just because they have money, and they want to buy it as an investment or because they want to become a syndicator and, and start their own business. So what apartment investors Club does is teaches people how to how to do that, but more than just how to do it, it really teaches them how to think like an investor, and how to approach these deals the right way. Because, like when I started out, you know, I thought this was easy. You watch HGTV HGTV, you think this is just like, you buy a building, and then magic happens and it’s fixed up. And now you run it and it’s really easy. You know, this is this is a really sort of nuts and bolts. Course with coaching, that that really teaches you how to analyze deals means to source them, analyze them, do the due diligence, operate them, and kind of like soup to nuts. So that is kind of like my way of giving back and helping people to try to avoid the mistakes that I made when I started out. So that’s really what the content is.
John Corcoran 42:43
Yeah. Final question. I’m a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way. Now, when I asked that a lot of times people will default to mentioning their family or their team. But what I’m really interested in is your peers, your contemporaries, your mentors, people like that, who’ve helped you in your journey. So who would you want to shout out? And who would you want to thank publicly?
Jonathan Twombly 43:06
I mean, I have a lot of people that I would like to shout out to, but I think, you know, I will thank my partner Barbu just really without him I could not have made the first hotel a success. And I could not be thinking about, Well, where can this go, you know, amongst other things, like where where I’m thinking about this going now is our own brand, right, our own, you know, us having 25 3040 hotels around the Northeast that that are all fitting this model of like a unique asset in a unique space that we can fix up and bring back to its former glory and kind of bringing it you know, under our own brand, so I would never have had that vision without Shiv and could not do this without him. So I’m very grateful for shifts in partnership and friendship.
John Corcoran 43:52
Yeah, Jonathan, this is great. Where can people go to learn more about your apartment investors at The Hotel Laurel and anywhere else? They should go?
Jonathan Twombly 44:00
Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton of places to find me. But if you are interested in the coaching program, that’s apartmentinvestorsclub.com. If you are interested in investing with me, google Two Bridges Asset Management. And you’ll find our investor forum, and if you want to go and stay in the Finger Lakes and enjoy beautiful views from your room and the restaurant, good wine and good wine from the local area. And good beer too. It’s The Hotel Laurel at Seneca.
John Corcoran 44:30
Excellent. All right, Jonathan, thank you so much.
Jonathan Twombly 44:34
Thank you, John.
Outro 44:36
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