The 5 Questions Podcast
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The 5 Questions Podcast
Building a Billion-Dollar Real Estate Empire: Veena Jetti's Inspirational Journey to Success and Philanthropy
Veena Jetti narrates her transformative journey from investing in single-family homes to commanding a portfolio that exceeded a billion dollars in transactions, emphasizing the importance of adaptability, persistence, and a community-driven approach. The episode also highlights her dedication to philanthropy and her vision of empowering others through mentorship to achieve their own success in real estate.
• Exploration of Veena's beginnings in real estate and initial misunderstandings about multifamily investing
• The challenges and draining experience of single-family home management
• Insights into transitioning to multifamily investments for scalability
• Essential strategies for raising capital effectively
• The role of rejection in building resilience and understanding market dynamics
• The importance of philanthropy and community support in her journey
• Recognition of inspiring future generations in real estate through mentorship
I thought it was for Jeff Bezos and. Oprah and like Kim Kardashian right.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the 5 Questions Podcast, where we unlock real estate and business insights one question at a time. We are at the Xpand conference and I have the pleasure of interviewing Veena Jetty. Veena, thank you so much for taking the time to answer some questions, and I'm just going to fix my mic a little bit, okay. But thank you so much because you're so busy. I saw you on stage. You just came off stage and ran right to our booth.
Speaker 1:Straight to you. I told you I was going to come back here. I am, I'm excited.
Speaker 2:So real estate, I think, is your thing. You bought a couple properties, managed to go and get over a billion dollars of transactions.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So that's not just a couple of properties. But you didn't start there, no, can you tell our viewers how did you start in real estate?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I started investing in single family and it was because I didn't know that someone like Veena Jetty could own multifamily. I thought it was for Jeff Bezos and Oprah, and like Kim Kardashian right.
Speaker 1:Like I thought it was for billionaires and people that had millions and millions and millions of dollars, and I didn't. When I first started, I started from zero and I started buying single family homes. There was a week where I put five properties under contract and, yeah, that's what I thought it was like. Oh my gosh, this is amazing, I'm going to do great. But then I immediately had two thoughts after that. The first thought was I really hate this because I had to go like 50 minutes here, two hours, this direction, an hour, this direction, to collect rent and answer for leaky toilets and all these things I hated. So that was my first thought. And then my second thought was I can never get to scale like this. If I want to ever have the audacity of owning 5,000 or 10,000 or a hundred thousand doors, there's no practical way for me to do this one single family home at a time. So I needed something to scale me up. That's where the power of multifamily really unlocked so many doors and basically a whole world I didn't know existed.
Speaker 2:So that leads to my second question. So you started very humbly, very simple single family homes. Now you upscale your portfolio and now you're playing in the multifamily game.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So how does someone move up or goes to multifamily?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and everyone asked me this question and they think I'm going to give them, like here's a silver bullet, go do it and I'll tell you. I accidentally stumbled into multifamily. I did not know that I was going to end up being a multifamily investor. I certainly did not know the scale at that I was going to end up being a multifamily investor. I certainly did not know the scale at which I was going to do it when I was in my single family woe right.
Speaker 1:And it's like, oh, I have to go and collect rent from 100 different people and I really hate this. I knew there was something else, but I didn't know what it was. And I love residential real estate because I love the idea of investing into an asset that someone is going to live in and that's their home, and that's where memories are made. And home is very important and special for me, and so I love that idea. And it's also recession resistant. You always are going to need a place to live. It's a tangible asset, exactly, exactly. And so I had a friend. He's exactly exactly. And so I had a friend he's still a good friend of mine. I actually was just texting him the other day and just I was reflecting on my journey and I said, joe, I don't know if I've ever specifically said this to you, but you changed my whole trajectory of where I am and where I'm going because he you know he reached out to me and he said, hey, do you want to buy this multifamily together? And I was like what can go wrong?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Literally everything can go wrong. That's the answer. Uh, but I didn't know. You know, I was young and dumb and I didn't know what I didn't know. I was still in my like unconscious, incompetent phase of learning. And so I said, yeah, okay, let's do it. And he's like great, it's 200 doors, it's $15.9 million. In Dallas, which I lived in Dallas, and he said we need you to do like ABC, like all this stuff and acquisitions and post-close management. One of the things I had to do was raise $1.2 million.
Speaker 2:Chump change for some, some not that much.
Speaker 1:Who is a chump change for when you're doing your first deal and you're in your mid-20s?
Speaker 2:For now Vina Jelly.
Speaker 1:Well now, but it took me a decade to get here right when I started, though, I was like okay, yeah, no problem, and I had like the cockiness of, you know, a 20 something year old new entrepreneur where I was like, whatever I can do that it's easy. It was not easy. I literally cried myself to sleep every single night for six weeks straight. I thought I ruined my family's financial future. I thought no one was ever going to want to work with me again. I thought that I was never going to be able work with me again. I thought that I was never going to be able to do another deal.
Speaker 1:I thought that I had just lost like hundreds of thousands of dollars of our own money that we'd put in earnest money because, we weren't going to be able to close the deal and you know it's because I went about trying to raise that capital the wrong way.
Speaker 1:So I was meeting no after no after no after no, and it's exhausting and it wears on you no, after no, after no, after no, and it's exhausting and it wears on you and when you're raising capital you're almost on an island because I couldn't go to my friends and family that I'm asking to invest in this deal. Be like no one wants to invest with me, because then they're gonna be like oh well.
Speaker 1:I don't want to either, then right, and so it became really challenging, and it's very lonely to go through it. The first time and back then, communities didn't exist, so there weren't these spaces where you could readily access information or other people who could even just sit in the mud with you and say, like it's OK, this is normal. I've been there too. Like that wasn't really a thing a decade ago.
Speaker 2:So now you're raising capital for that multifamily deal. And it brings us to my third question. I want to ask you Raising capital. You need to do it if you want to scale. Everybody, everybody runs out of money at some point in time. How does someone start? Some people might think, oh, it's too big for me. How can I raise money? I'm not a banker, I don't know nothing about it. How does someone put themselves in a mentality of raising money and how can they do it?
Speaker 1:this is the single most important skill set that anybody yeah, anybody real estate or not can learn, because this is transferable across all industries and every company, real estate or not, will need to know how to raise capital in order to get to scale and in order to grow, whether that's from the bank, retail investors, institutional investors, whether you're raising debt equity, it doesn't matter. You need to know the skill set of raising capital. So the first and I'll tell you, the first deal that I was raising on I did not know many things, many things, and I remember I had an investor. I was talking to him and he was like really excited about the deal, and then he asked me the question are you raising debt or equity? And I was like I don't know. But you can't say I don't know, right, because this is like a basic question you should know the answer to. So I think about it. Right, this is my inner dialogue. I'm like, okay, vino, you have a 50-50 shot of getting this correct, regardless of which you answer. So I was like all right debt.
Speaker 2:Was it the right answer?
Speaker 1:No, it was not the right answer. And the investor was like, huh, you're raising debt. And I'm like shit, I answered the wrong answer. So I was like, oh yeah, you know, we're just, we're structured the way we are, but you know what? Let me confirm, my partner handles this. Let me confirm and get back to you and I did confirm that I was in fact wrong. We were raising equity. I did go back to him and tell him, with a lot of egg on my face, that this was an equity investment. He did not invest with me, needless to say, but this is like a decade ago. But here's the thing it's only hard the first time you do it right it's only scary.
Speaker 1:The first time you hear the question you don't know the answer to. Now, if you ask me, are you raising debt or equity? I can tell you that it's equity. I can tell you why. I can tell you why we don't do debt, why we structure the way we structure. I know everything there is to know about this on my projects. So it taught me something and it helped me get better from that rejection or that failure.
Speaker 2:And this is the thing that people should understand and know is that it's okay to get rejection, because that's what builds your in French, carapace.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to say it I'm looking for my.
Speaker 1:English word today. It builds your character.
Speaker 2:Yeah, your character, because you are going to get no's.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:It's not going to be all yeses.
Speaker 1:Yes, I get way more no's than I do a yes. But here's something people don't know when you're raising capital, a fast no is way better than a slow yes. I would ask for a fast no 100 out of 100 times versus someone that's a slow yes. And what I mean by that is if I come to you and I say, hey, I have a really great deal, mario, I think you're really going to love it. Here's why you should invest in it and you go no thanks, and it can be for any reason it can be, I don't like multifamily.
Speaker 1:I don't like multifamily, I don't have the money. I don't like you, vina, like I don't really care what it is. You tell me no definitively and I go. Okay, he just said not right now. Right, like I convert it in my mind to a not right now and I try to understand why. I'll say why not? And Dallas, texas, okay, great, now when I have a deal in Atlanta, I'm going to come to you and say, hey, I have a deal in Atlanta. I know you didn't like Dallas, but now do you like Atlanta? Right, so I get to know you better when you say no to me. And then, more importantly, if you tell me no right away, I don't have to spend any more time trying to get you across the finish line of investing in my deal.
Speaker 1:I can go and spend time with Susie Smith, who is going to actually be proactive and she's excited and she wants to do this deal with me when I have to convince you or I have to take a lot of time holding your hand and I don't mean basic due diligence, I mean like hours and hours and hours and hours, or days and days and days, which does happen sometimes that slow yes means that there's a very high likelihood that you're saying yes because you don't have a way to say no and you're not really in it, and that means that when it comes time to write the check and give me the money, you're going to be nowhere to be found absolutely.
Speaker 2:And then you know you can. You can get to almost the finish line and they pull out and it's like 100.
Speaker 1:Then now you're stressed yeah, and you've spent all this time, you've invested all this energy and effort where I could have invested that in someone who was excited about the project.
Speaker 2:So fourth question for you yeah, you. Well, let's recap. You started in single family home, upgraded to multi-family. You raised now you, now you transaction transacted over a billion dollars in transactions. You like to give back to the community. You're a philanthropist, you like to support charity work. Can you tell me more about it and why you do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So Warren Buffett said if you're lucky enough to be in the top 1%, it's your responsibility to look out for the 99%. And you know I tell people this when they talk about what I've done in my success, especially in the context of being a woman of color right In these traditionally male dominated spaces. Yes, I've had adversity to overcome, but I've also had a lot of privilege too, right. I grew up in a two-parent household. I grew up abled. I didn't have any neurodivergence. I grew up in a household where education was valued and was encouraged and my parents invested in my sister and my education and development. I didn't have any violence in the home.
Speaker 2:We weren't rich, but we weren't poor.
Speaker 1:I didn't have any violence in the home. We weren't rich, but we weren't poor. I didn't have food insecurity growing up, so all of those things gave me a springboard to do what I do, and my parents have always instilled the value of investing into the community around you.
Speaker 1:So some of the organizations that we support, we love waterorg. Waterorg is really great because they invest in the infrastructure of different African countries and Asian countries where the village doesn't have running water or water infrastructure. And the reason I do that specifically is because I fundamentally believe that the value of a society is based on how they treat women and girls, and what I found when I was researching this is that when there is a village that doesn't have access to clean water, they will pull young girls out of school at very young ages and they will send them two hours to go walk and fetch water for the family and then bring that back.
Speaker 1:So girls don't get educated and by every metric that a society cares about, making sure that girls get educated is the number one predictor of whether they will get pregnant young or be in the cycle of poverty, and by allowing girls to stay in school because you've provided water infrastructure, you're now allowing them the opportunity to delay getting pregnant, to not be as dependent on a man and not have to get married as young.
Speaker 2:That's unbelievable. Like all of this for water.
Speaker 1:For water.
Speaker 2:It can affect lives, something that we take for granted.
Speaker 1:For water. It can affect lives, Something that we take for granted because it's so readily available to us. So that's one we really love. I also love ripmedicaldebtorg. In the US it's a really big problem that most people can't afford health care.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And it's one of the leading causes of bankruptcy or financial devastation or ruin is lack of access to basic health care. We don't have universal health care in the US and RIP medical debt. For every dollar you donate to them, they'll wipe out $100 of medical debt for somebody, and I think that that's a very important cause to donate toward. I do a lot of grassroots donations too. Cause to donate to work I do a lot of grassroots donations too, so I like to give it just to the person in general, because then I know where the money's going. So one of my really good friends, jeezy. He has the Street Dreams Foundation, so I have been recently getting involved with them. We just did the world's largest toy drive in the Dallas area and we gave away 5,000 plus toys.
Speaker 1:That's cool, yeah. So you know, giving back is what it's about. How much do we need?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean at some point, how much food can you eat in a day? How much clothes can you wear in a week?
Speaker 1:I mean, I can eat a lot of food in a day, but I have enough right and I can give and honestly for me now I'm even more passionate about it, because I want to teach my children this, because my children. They're growing up in a different world than I grew up in, because we have more money than my parents had and they I see them becoming entitled, I see them acting in privileged ways and I have to remind them.
Speaker 1:often I see them acting in privileged ways and I have to remind them often, like you didn't earn any of this, you don't deserve any of this.
Speaker 1:This is a privilege. You won the birth lottery. That's all you did. You didn't do anything to get to be here One day. You will, but right now you have it and you get to benefit from this because mommy and daddy work really hard and we want certain lifestyle conveniences Right but you didn't earn that and I don't want my daughters to grow up thinking that they're somehow better than someone because they happen to be born into our family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is you know. I commend you for this because not enough people give back to others in more need than we are right. So I congratulate you on sharing the wealth to others.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:So last and final question you invested single family homes, went to a multifamily, raised millions and millions of dollars, up to a billion dollars in transactions. Yes, Now you're giving back to the communities. It seems like a full circle, full story. You can't get better than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So what's going to come next for Vina?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know this is something I've been struggling with because you know we're getting to the end of the year and everyone's asking me what are your goals for next year? And everyone's really surprised when I say I know what, they're not. And they go, okay, what? And I say, well, it's not to get to X billions of dollars, it's not to make X amount of money. None of that is the goal anymore.
Speaker 1:It definitely was early on but, it's not anymore because it's not as exciting anymore. The thing that excites me now is seeing people who otherwise wouldn't have been able to do this finding an inroad to be on this same path to success. And I'll tell you a story about a young man. His name is Yannick and he's part of my multi community and he came into the community. He is an immigrant, came to this country all by himself, so parents, brothers, sisters are not with him, he's by himself and he goes Veena. What's the fastest that someone in our community has done a deal? I said you know, I'd say about like six and a half, seven months from the time you join the multi-community to doing your first deal, getting your first deal under contract, because multifamily is a slow game, it's a slow burn, and he goes once I get my work permit I'm gonna do it faster. And I said I hope you do.
Speaker 2:Now he's 22 years old, so I'm like, yes, but I want you to have that tenacity right like what's the worst, that happens.
Speaker 1:It takes him six months or eight months or whatever, but he's going to do it, and that's the point. So I'm like, yes, I love this. He came back to me. He got his work permit. Two and a half months later he came back to me and said I have an 86 unit building under contract in Lubbock, Texas. I am raising capital for it. He's raised $1.1 million for 22 year old 22.
Speaker 1:He's now 23. So, 23 years old, you have come to this country with nothing, without anybody, without a safety net, and you're buying 86 doors Like this is what the American dream is. This is the land of opportunity. It's the same reason my parents left India and came to the US is for us to be able to have that chance to do something great. And so I think what my goals definitely center around is helping the Yonix of the world. Um, my mindset coach, rosie Noel. She is now going out and she is doing more. She she just started her own company. She was working at like this big 10,000 person company and she was doing coaching.
Speaker 1:She coaches CEOs like elite level and she now coaches in my community and I want to help her grow her business because I think it's so important what she's doing and her work is.
Speaker 1:It's changed my life Like she's added the most amount of money to my balance sheet is because of Rosie, because she has poured into me. She helps me, she coaches me, she keeps my mindset right. I was just talking to her earlier today and so I coach with her all the time. Anytime I have something that's like not going well or going really well, or I'm unsure, or whatever, I always go back to her. She's my home base and so you know, helping her grow her business. That's definitely on my list for 2025.
Speaker 2:And speaking on more stages, I think, well, you know that's. It's great. I think you have great goals and stages are a great place and I think they're meant to be influential to other people. You can change people's lives even if you don't talk to them directly, because if your message is powerful, you can inspire people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I've learned that, and that's part of what I love about speaking is well, I'm a people person.
Speaker 1:So I get to meet more people, because after I get off stage, people will come and find me and talk to me and I'm like, yes, tell me everything about your life, start with the day you were born and don't leave anything out. And so find me and talk to me and I'm like, yes, tell me everything about your life, start with the day you were born and don't leave anything out, right, um, and so that's one thing I love, but I also the number one comment I get is. I love seeing women up here there's not enough women on this stage and I'm like, yes, you're right, join me on this stage next year.
Speaker 2:Won't you.
Speaker 1:Like I want other women to feel inspired. I want minorities, people from different socioeconomic or educational backgrounds, to feel inspired that they too can do this Because, like I am not smarter than the average person, I'm just like a regular person. I'm just more stubborn than the average person.
Speaker 2:So I'm never going to quit, I'm going to keep going.
Speaker 1:Exactly, grit is the number one determinant of success. Veena, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Exactly, grit is the number one determinant of success. Future again together, because I like to surround myself with people that succeed and you clearly succeeded, so hopefully we'll talk together again soon?
Speaker 1:Yes, I hope so, and I have to say as, like a closing remark, last year, in 2023, I spoke on 110 different stages, so I've seen all of the conferences and I've seen all of the booths and all of the setups. I have to say that this is by far my favorite setup. It is so well done. Like this is such an amazing podcast opportunity that you have. Like what a great way to get so many people to stop and to answer these questions. And so kudos to you because it's clear you do everything with excellence, thank you, so I really appreciate that.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having excellence, thank you. So I really appreciate that and thank you for having me. Thank you, and again, I can't thank you enough for taking the time for being with us. Thank you, thanks for tuning into the 5 Questions Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, like and hit the notification bell on our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Stay tuned for more insights and tips to transform your real estate and business game. See you next time.