Level Up Your Real Estate Investing Through Collaborations With Kavitha Baratakke

 

Are you looking to level up your real estate investing journey? In this episode, Lisa Hylton is joined by Kavitha Baratakke, a Principal at Cherry Street Investments, to discuss the power of collaboration that can take you to the top of your real estate investing goals. Get to know how Kavitha got into real estate investing and her journey to becoming a passive real estate investor and financial freedom. Lisa and Kavitha also dive into hosting webinars and Kavitha’s drive to pass on knowledge to kids and help other passive investors learn and level up their real estate investing journey.

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Level Up Your Real Estate Investing Through Collaborations With Kavitha Baratakke

I have another amazing guest on my show. Her name is Kavitha Baratakke. She is a Principal at Cherry Street Investments and an Austin-based real estate investor. She’s a full-time multifamily sponsor with many years of investing experience in single-family and multifamily real estate. Prior to real estate, she spent nineteen-plus years as a Technology Professional for IBM and Atlassian in various roles across software development, customer services, partner relations, and technical account management.

She brings strong analytical problem solving and presentation skills from her technology background to real estate. Kavitha invested in over $100 million/2,200-plus doors worth of assets as a limited partner and over $80 million of assets as a general partner. She is primarily focused on multifamily but is actively exploring other asset classes as well. Besides syndication, Kavitha actively helps investors and business owners set up life insurance banking policies. She is also a realtor specializing in the Central Texas region and Austin, Texas in particular. Kavitha, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on. I’m excited to be here.

For my audience, if you have not run across Kavitha on social media platforms, that is Facebook. Kavitha runs amazing webinars where she brings on experts who talk about everything from all the different types of real estate to emerging trends from the CARES Act to insurance, taxes, the whole nine yards. You want to check out her Cherry Street Investments webinars that she posted on Facebook. You want to get into that for sure. In this episode, we are going to be diving into how Kavitha got started investing in real estate. The process of transitioning from working in Corporate America for almost twenty years to becoming a full-time real estate investor, which for some people that is an aspiration. Hearing stories of people who have made that happen, hopefully, will be inspiring to you. To start, Kavitha, can you talk to us about how you got started investing in real estate?

I got started investing in real estate jumping from the stock market. I was trading options and one of my colleagues got me into trading options. Right about the 2008 timeframe, I also got a divorce. I got some money from buying myself out of the house and I started trading options with that. It’s not the best move, not my finest hour but that’s what it was. It turned out well for me. I lost and I made some money, but at the end of the day, I realized that I spent too much time watching stock tickers all day long and just the volatility of it, ups and downs and losing money. It made me realize that’s not what I wanted for myself. I started looking for other investments and that was 2008, 2009. That was perfect timing in terms of the market crash.

Warren Buffet always says, “You don’t rush after an investment when it’s on the peak,” which a lot of people tend to do, “but you get in when it’s rock bottom.” 2008, 2009 was rock bottom for real estate. I bought my first house for $0.54 a square foot in Austin. If anybody knows construction, that’s not even construction cost. It was cheap. I wish I could have bought more houses at that time, but I staggered it because I wasn’t sure of how renting and dealing with tenants will be. I bought it over the next few years and also I had to build up the capital to buy them. I did a lot of that BRRRR strategy. I didn’t know what that was, but it made sense. As a marketer, you refinanced and you use the cash towards buying other homes. That’s where I got started.

 

What were some of your early lessons from that experience in getting started? What were some of the things that you learned during that time that impacted your journey as you continued?

The one thing important that always stood out to me from my investing experience is I’ve learned that your relationship with money is important. You can’t let upsides and downsides either take you to high or take you to low. You have to establish that money is a resource. It comes and it goes. That’s the fact of life. You’re not going to be 100% right about every investment you make. Sometimes you’re going to get lucky too. There was a combination of luck and a combination of timing when I got involved in real estate. The whole episode or investing experience made me realize what my relationship with money was. I didn’t want money to control me. I would control money and that was a resource that I had at my disposal. That gave me confidence that I could create it when I wanted. That’s important when you get started is that a lot of us tend to have money dictate our lives. We should be dictating money as a resource. You make it happen.

How do you play in real estate?

I did single-families for the next few years. I ended up buying single-family homes for almost 1 or 2 a year. I had a house in India that I sold. I brought that back in 2012 and ended up buying more houses here because in India, there’s no concept of leverage. Loans are 10% to 12%. I’m not going to place a loan and buy a house. I had bought a house in India and I had cash sunk into the house. I brought that back here, although that appreciated I lost because of currency exchanges.

Overall, I did make some money and I ended up putting that money into three houses here. Because of leverage, I could put that much less into a single house. It grew from there. You have to work on creating the snowball effect if you’re starting single-family. If you start in multifamily, then you should look at syndications because that helps you create that snowball effect and it helps you create that capital you need for purchasing more real estate. For me, it’s a slower journey because I waited for houses to appreciate that happened to be an appreciating market. I then refinanced them and put them in other houses. I just kept buying to the point that I got tired of dealing with tenants. I was self-managing it because the tax rates in Austin were high. In Austin and the surrounding area, we paid 3% in property taxes.

Your relationship with money is important. You have to establish that money is a resource and it comes and goes; that's the fact of life. Share on X

It’s hard for us to have enough cashflow here to have a property management company, pay all the bills, and make any money at all. My objective there has never been to make money on the frontend like cashflow. I had a full-time job this whole time. I was managing my houses, buying houses on the weekends, and hustling as you do, take your time off from work in real estate. I always work more than 750 hours in real estate, but never could get qualified as a real estate professional because I had a W-2 job. I did that for 8, 9 years until I found multifamily.

I used to talk to a professor that I know well. He’s at UT. I said, “I just want to buy my apartment, a 25-unit that cashflow, and I’m done. I’m retiring myself.” That was my goal somewhere far away. I had no idea how to start with apartments. I kept looking and accidentally one of my friend’s friend, I met her at the winery when I went out. She happened to be in apartment investing already. She introduced me to the whole world. I got to go to a Meetup. Everything happened in 2017 and everything came together. I got into passive investing initially. I started learning. I was driving almost every month or more to Dallas because I got on a mentorship group. I was trying to network, understand, and soak up everything I could because it is a different space. You do have some parallels, but underwriting, all of that stuff in the commercial space is different. Once you do an apartment, you get a good preview on other asset classes, but you cannot compare it to having my single-family home worksheet. It’s not the same.

At what point did you leave your job?

I left my job in 2019, so 2 or 3 years almost after I got started in apartments. It was a little bit of ramping up to it, to be honest. I had some cashflow from my single-family homes, but then I started refinancing and cashing out. I did huge cash-out refi on all the homes. I had a bit of capital and that’s when I started looking to invest in an apartment. My thought was I’m going to buy a 20-unit, 25-unit in San Antonio where prices were still affordable. Austin was unaffordable. I kept looking all of 2017, and 2018 also. That’s all I did. I underwrote a whole bunch. I did not want to syndicate and I did not want to raise capital. I wanted to do my deal.

I said, “I’m going to learn from my deal and if that goes well, then I’m going to go syndicate.” I spent a lot of cycles doing that. I wasn’t finding the deal that I wanted and getting frustrated with the whole process. One thing I did learn is I’m not an acquisitions person. I’m better at handling investors, teaching them how to do things, all that good stuff. I love educating people but talking to brokers, doing that all day long was draining for me. A lot of brokers at that point weren’t even talking to newbies. It’s like a wall. Maybe now it’s better because the market’s not great. The multifamily market hasn’t come down much.

Would you say that taking all that action you took to try to go after the deal on your own helped you to see where your strengths and weaknesses were in the process?

Absolutely. Chasing after brokers and trying to talk to people. What brokers do when you first meet them is that they’re going to throw you the crappiest deals. They want to see if you bite and if you know how to do your numbers. You come back and give them feedback saying, “This is not what I want.” In the sense, they always test you. I found that they gave me the crappiest deals, initially. As I started interacting with them more and more, they understood that I’m not going to bite those crappy deals. Things do get better. I also realized along the way that I’m spending a lot of time. I was passively investing in those two years. I wasn’t sitting back.

I invested all of my 401(k) from my IRA. I did some other investments outside of that, but I wasn’t buying what I wanted to buy or I was looking at buying. It never worked out for whatever reason. We found an apartment. Me and my partner I thought we’d take down an apartment together, just the two of us, no investors. After going through the cycle, I learned a lot, but I did nothing. I had nothing to show for it. A lot of investors, when they first come into apartments, they get frustrated because they expect the turnaround time to be like buying a house, but it isn’t. It’s going to take some time, but once that first deal kicks in, that’s when your momentum picks up and everybody I know attest to this. It’s how it is. It seems like this long testing period until you get to that first deal and then it’s exponential after that.

 

Going back on deciding to leave your full-time job. When did you know that you were ready?

In parallel, while I was doing these options investing, I had a chunk of change when I had refinanced my homes. I ended up buying some auction houses, that was new for me. I went online and looked up an auction site. It’s not Auction.com. I’m not giving away my site. It’s a small auction site. I bought a couple of houses cash in San Antonio for cheap and then fixed them up. Once that cashflow started coming, I rented them out. I never have a strategy of flipping houses as much because, for me, I didn’t want to create taxable events. I already had a great W-2 job. I didn’t feel like I needed to do that. I bought a couple of houses, more houses to add to my portfolio, while I was doing apartments.

When I did the numbers, my cashflow from all these houses could support my expenses for the month. It’s like Kiyosaki says, “I’m retired out of the rat race. I’m pulling myself out of the rat race.” It was a gradual thing. The financing strategy helped me build that up. Buying these houses cash and not having to deal with the mortgage, but adding value to them. I bought it for $120,000 and they were worth $200,000-plus. I was able to create an immense amount of value. I could have refinanced it, paid a mortgage, but I looked at my cashflow numbers and I said, “I need cashflow if I want to make this leap.” I’m never going to make the leap unless I push myself out there because it’s hard to leave a well-paying job.

My last job was well-paying. I loved what I did, but after many years of doing something, I knew that I wanted to be in real estate. I know a lot of people who were in my boat were like, “I’ve done the same thing for many years.” I’ve done different things in technology. It’s not necessarily the same thing but it’s still a job like a 9 to 5. All the structure around it. I wanted to be my boss at some point. I said, “I could give myself a year.” I know that I have cashflow and I have covered my expenses. I’ll give myself a year to work on the business full-time and see how it goes. If I don’t like what I’m doing or it’s not going well, I can always go back to my technology job. It isn’t that hard to find a job. That was how I tricked my head because I think the bigger problem is not that you have the cashflow to call your expenses. The bigger problem is getting away from the comfort of a paycheck.

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That for me was a realization that “Money is not hitting my bank account.” It’s much more than my cashflow. I’ve built it up over a period of time to create additional cashflow to my bank account with other investments since I left. When I first started, I was just breaking even on my expenses and my cashflow. Looking at that dwindling cashflow was not easy compared to my job, but I was looking at it as a foundation and saying, “If I can build it up the next year and I can build up my business the next year, I’ll be fine.” At least I’m going to give myself a year to see how it works out. Let’s put it that way.

Pivoting from that, to move on to the webinars that you put. Can you talk a little bit about the journey to deciding to do webinars? Because there are many different ways, you can add value to investors and to people in general. I’m curious about that path and how it’s been for you.

I had no idea or no intention of doing a webinar when I started. What happened was I did a Meetup in Austin, this was called Purely Passive. That’s still the name I use, Purely Passive Investor Group. I created this Meetup called Purely Passive Investing. The goal was I had taken way too long to learn how to be a passive investor. Seriously, I joined this group out of Dallas not to be a full-time sponsor. I joined them to be a passive investor. I feel like I’d spent three years of my life going back and forth from Dallas to become a passive investor. I didn’t feel it was not necessary. I was like, “A passive investor shouldn’t have to learn so much. A passive investor needs to be aware of these sets of topics.” I’m grateful that I learned so much, but not everybody has the time, the inclination, and they don’t want to spend that much time learning to be investing passively. I also saw that passive cashflow can add up significantly over a period of time.

I look back at myself in 2017 and said, “What tools would I want to have? What knowledge would I want to have come to me that I could be where I am now?” Not necessarily as a sponsor, but as a passive investor. How could I build up cashflow? I saw a clear path there and I said, “I’m going to set up a Meetup in Austin.” That was my goal. I’m going to teach this set of people how to get there. Start where I started and how to get where I am now. My goal is simple. I want to help more people be financially free because I believe that your life’s best work is done when you don’t have the pressure of making money. You don’t have the pressure of earning a livelihood, then you’re creative and every aspect of you grows. That’s been my experience.

I want to see more people doing what they love rather than doing a 9 to 5 because it pays well or they need to maintain a certain lifestyle. Unfortunately, the first Meetup was great. I had about 30 people in the Meetup. The second Meetup was a disaster. The third one went downhill from there. First Meetup was multifamily. I talked about multifamily. I’d riled up a bit of interest in my friend circle and my community. The second Meetup was opportunity zones and then 1031 Exchanges. The idea was to educate themselves and everything out there that is relevant to them if they’re planning to invest in anyway. I always had this thing that multifamily is not the only investment for passive. They should be able to look at other asset classes. I want to personally invest in other asset classes and diversify. I want to be able to help my investors do the same.

I realized quickly that passive investors are passive for a reason. They don’t want to do much. They don’t even want to show up at a Meetup. I started like, “I’m going to take the Meetup to them because I’m going to start doing webinars.” What’s your excuse if you want to make money and information coming to you at home? All you have to do is click a button and join. I can’t think of much, so that’s how my webinar started. The first one was good. I had good attendance for the first one. It ramped up from there. It’s been successively better. I still have the webinar, a little bit of Zoom, I think I’ve crossed the limit once, but the sign-up is much more than actual people showing up. I still see about a 60% show rate on the webinars. If I have 200 people sign-up, about 100 show up.

I love the fact that the webinars can be emailed out. People then can listen to them on their own time because many times that’s when I get to listen to them. When the webinars in progress, I might be doing something else, but then because I signed up, I see it in my email and I’m like, “I wanted to listen to that,” then I get the information. It’s been helpful.

It’s reusable. The way I look at it coming from a computer science technology background, reusability of information is the key. You save so much time by not having to do it over and over again. If you think about a Meetup, you’re going to speak there, but that information you could record it. I don’t know about the audio quality there, but it’s not reusable like webinar recording is. Investors have a question about how multifamily works. I first send them the link. They watch the webinar. I said, “We’re going to set up a call after that.” We’re going to talk about the questions you have from watching the webinar, rather than, “I start up here” because they already have that knowledge. It makes things a lot easier.

 

I noticed that you also provide webinars with financial education for children. Can you talk about how that evolved for you?

That evolved with COVID. What happened was a few years ago, my daughter is not interested in what I do, let’s put it that way. She’s simply not interested. She’s fifteen years old and she was in middle school a few years ago. I said, “I wanted you to get more involved.” The most she’s done is she loves painting. If I show her the spreadsheet, she’s probably going to zone out on me. She used to come to my rental houses and helped me paint stuff when I was fixing up things. She loves hands-on work. I wanted to get her more money aware of what is going on in the financial world besides her art and the things she likes doing. She would not sit down and never listen to me. I said, “I’m going to set up a club in her middle school and that’s going to be not just for her, but a lot of parents are on the situation where they want their kids to be more money-wise,” which is why the webinar is called Money-Wise Learning. I want my daughter to be more money-wise. I want her to start young.

I started doing this every two weeks after-school classes in her middle school. It was an after-school club. I did that for twelve weeks. It covered a different range of topics with middle school children. My daughter was absent for probably about half the sessions even after school because she had other after school activities to do. I think something got through her. I always look at these activities as it doesn’t matter even if they pick up only 5% of what you teach, but they’re also still starting at a higher place than a lot of adults do. Being a landlord, I saw many credit reports and I felt sorry for people because the foundational aspects of managing money is completely missing in a lot of people. I’ve seen people that earn well who are living paycheck to paycheck. I was like, “There’s no reason this person with their income should be living paycheck to paycheck.” They have no savings. They maxed out the credit cards and I’ve seen this over and over again repeatedly in multiple potential tenants. I wanted to change something at the deeper level with kids and say, “This is probably a better time to start than to teach an adult how to change things.” If you start young, you don’t even get to that point of having to undo what you’ve already screwed up. That was my motivation.

When COVID happened, I needed a sense of purpose. The first couple of weeks were tough. I think for everybody across the board I’ve talked to everybody was in a shock, “Is this really happening? Is this for real?” At that time I was talking to someone on Facebook over a post she had made, “How are you using your time?” I said, “I’m going to ramp up one on my webinars.” All these CARES Act and everything were coming out. I wanted to give people more insight. I wanted to get more insight as well. I think my lens has always been, what do I wish I knew now? That’s the lens I look at things. What do I wish someone would teach me now? When the CARES Act happened, I’m like, “I can’t navigate all this stuff. It’s too much information. I want to distill it down to consumable information.”

I started doing weekly webinars for the last few months. I dialed them down back to twice a month. I started doing that. The kids’ education can happen the same way where my friend was asking, “What are you guys doing?” I said, “I have this content that I’ve created for kids. I want to package it and start doing weekly webinars for kids and walk through this whole package.” The kids are home doing nothing. They have some school, but it’s not the level of education that was there before. I’m sure they can spare an hour in their week to learn something that will be useful for them for life. That’s how it started. Then we’ve gone through 11 weeks. I’m at the 12th week with them. I love my kids. I’ve loved to see how much they’ve grown. It’s music to my ears when they talk about assets and liabilities. It’s something they understand. It’s cool. Some of them are like, “I want to do some stock market trading. I want to invest in real estate.” I didn’t know that at eleven years old. I didn’t even have a clue.

It makes me think back at what you were saying in the beginning of this show, which is when people get to a certain point in their journey financially. They’re able to tap into doing things that they enjoy doing. They would not have got to inspired to do otherwise sometimes. That leads me to my last two questions here. The first one is collaborating with others. You touched on this when you talked about investing in apartments. How you and your partner were trying to do it and take it down on your own, and then it sounded to collaborate with others perhaps. Even on your webinars, you’re bringing on experts. There are some that you’re doing on your own, etc., but that’s also an area of collaboration. Can you talk about how collaboration has impacted your business and the way you continue to grow?

Collaboration is key. What I didn’t mention is that after my unsuccessful attempts at buying an apartment for two years. I ended up collaborating with a group of people on the first deal. Where I didn’t have a huge role to play, but I still started somewhere. When I met this person in another event that I went to, he convinced me that that was bad for me based on my skillset. He found like, “You can talk to anybody and you can explain things down well.” He saw something in me that I didn’t. He invited me to join their team for that particular apartment that they were working on. I did that. I said, “I’m going to do it. What I have to lose at this point.” My own ways of going out there and trying to get a deal haven’t been super successful. I joined the team and I started working with them. Somehow, once you start doing that stuff, it’s one deal leads to another. People talk to other people and they say, “She does this.” I think earlier people are always associated me with, “She wants to do our own thing versus she wants to collaborate and do a deal together.” Most deals started coming my way and people who already had a deal in place started reaching out to me. I ended up doing four deals in 2019 instead of zero.

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Collaboration is everything. You can do it all, especially in an apartment space. You could go buy a single-family home yourself. In apartments, you have to be a part of the team. It’s non-negotiable. You don’t want to go buy your own and start there. Collaborate with other people. People have different strengths. Leverage and figure out what your strength is. What do you bring to the table? What are you good at? What are you passionate about? If you get that, it’s unstoppable. It works out. You don’t even have to think about it.

Touching on that before I get into my last question here. Advice for people who might still be hesitant about playing in the space of teams. The number one thing that I hear from individuals I talk to is they don’t know what role they could play. In your case it sounded someone saw something in you. Can you talk about how people could navigate that? Being open to someone else seeing that or pouring into them to share what role they could play or taking action in different ways?

You have to start where you’re exposed to a bunch of other investors. That’s where joining a group or being a part of a bigger group helps. You have to network in this industry if you want to get started. You can sit in your house, buy a single-family home, and be an investor. If you want to be in any large space like multifamily and commercial asset class, you have to be out there networking with people and always looking for people that you can work with or get along well with. You have to be looking at that and what is it that you’re good at? What fires you? We all know that to some extent.

I realized for me, it was talking to people and explaining things to them, which is why the Meetup started. People always look at me as a resource that they can come back and ask questions too. I didn’t think about myself as a teacher. I like teaching people. I love teaching people when I figured out something myself. I want to share it with everybody. I’m like, “I figured this out. Let’s do it.” My teaching would be unconventional. It’s more like speaking to someone. A lot of people call me when they have questions. That should tell you something. If people are looking at me as a thought leader or looking at me for information, they already have placed a lot of trust in me, which is great. If you can build that trust with people, you know that you are in a good place.

For me, that was a starting point. When I started seeing that and started developing on that trait, I wasn’t comfortable on my first webinar like I do it now. It takes refining and you go through your own motions to learn more about yourself along the way. The starting point is being around a lot of people, having a mentor, honing in on what your specific attributes are that make you stand out from others. We all have a set of skills. I’ve seen people that are good at asset managers. That’s what they do well. They love digging into things. I’ve seen people who love numbers. They could be doing underwriting all day long. You know which one you fit into.

Thank you so much, Kavitha. I appreciate it. My last three questions are the level-up questions that I ask all my guests. The first one is, what are you grateful for in your life?

I’m grateful for my journey. I’ve been through some dark times. We all have, in different ways. My daughter was sick when she was born. She had a huge heart condition. I’ve had to navigate that and the divorce, a lot of dark times. I’m grateful that many years later, I’m here and doing well in spite of everything. I feel very blessed. I’m grateful that I love doing what I do. I wake up every day and I’m excited. I wanted that for myself. I want that for everybody out there. I want that for my child. I want her to wake up and say, “I love what I do. I can’t wait to start the day.”

What has attributed to your continued success and growth?

I don’t look at success as a straight line. There is no continuous success. There’s a lot of failures that you don’t see. Unfortunately, I have plenty of them. I was telling someone that I’m going to write a blog about Fail Your Way to Success. You have to fail a lot and you have to screw up things a lot. I’ve had my share of screw-ups. Success is keeping ongoing. Resilience is what matters. It’s not the setbacks. It’s not opportunity. You want to be able to take advantage of opportunities. You want to be able to handle the challenges, but the fact that you can get up and do it again is what sets people up for success.

Lastly, what do you know now that you wish you knew at the beginning of your journey?

I wish I had started in apartments in 2008. I wish I found a multifamily mentor when I first started. Honestly, if you had got into apartments instead of a single-family home back then, I would have been like, “See you in the Bahamas.” I wish I had learned about things much sooner, but it’s never too late. People get into the 60s and learn about apartment investing. I managed it in my 30s or 40s, so it’s okay. Things come to you when you’re ready to receive them. That’s true in a lot of ways. You have to be mentally, emotionally be ready to receive what’s coming to you. Sometimes things come to you, you don’t take it or you don’t see it. There is that maturity aspect involved. We’re always in progress and evolving. When you’re ready to receive something, you do receive it. I don’t feel like I could have done it any sooner. I like to think that but I don’t.

 

If my readers would like to learn more about you, your website, your offerings, your webinars, etc., where can they go?

You can go to CherryStreetInvestments.com. I have an eBook on the Different Ways to Invest in Single-Family Homes, which I started with. I also have some resources if you’re a passive investor and you want to do your due diligence on an apartment. I have some free resources for that. You can go to CherryStreetInvestments.com/resources. If you want to sign up for webinars, I’m having one in which we have some experts coming and talking about investing in senior living. I like to keep expanding on what I’m doing. The other webinars we have is estate planning. A lot of people don’t have an estate plan in place. Everything that’s going on that you need to be focused on. I’m always coming up with new topics. If you want to check out webinars, it’s CherryStreetInvestments.com/webinars.

Thank you so much again for coming on. I appreciate it, Kavitha.

Thank you for having me on. I always enjoy talking to you. We talked before and this was awesome.

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What an amazing episode. I love it. There were so many takeaways, let’s be honest. The three ones for me, number one, taking action brings clarity, and lights the path. Kavitha has taken so much action doing many different things. Through that, she admitted that sometimes things didn’t work out, but that resilience, the ability to get back up and say, “Let me try again. Let me try something different.” That has provided her with where she was many years ago to where she is now in her life. How grateful she is for where she is and blessed.

The next item is I loved her story about developing her webinars for investors. What a story, starting with the Meetups to then things not working, but then pivoting into doing the webinars. These webinars are amazing. If you have not checked out her webinars, you need to check them out and learn more. I also love how she’s providing webinars for children. That’s cool. Being able to impact the next generation in a positive way. Helping them to build a foundation of finance and being able to take care of their money. That’s going to give dividends to the next generation for years and decades going forward. It’s a beautiful service and being able to provide to others.

Leverage and figure out what your strength is because when you get that, you’re unstoppable. Share on X

She also noted that when she’s thinking about the way she can add value or provide offerings to her investors or to the world, she thinks about starting from a place of, what would I want to know that I don’t know? That is a beautiful question that even you as a reader could think about. What would you want to know? Through your network, you could put together people that you know that could learn more of that information, obtain and share that information with other people. That helps them to make better decisions or make decisions that they want to make.

That brings me to my last point, which is the power of collaboration. She talks about people who want to play in the space of apartments. How important it is to be on that team, to build teams, to create and collaborate, to nurture the team environment and how important is that. She talks about the struggle of trying to underwrite deals and try to take deals on their own, going on with that for an entire two years. In 2019, one year alone, they were able to close four deals by collaborating with other people. Don’t underestimate your network and the people within your network. There’s power there. Being able to contribute and help others, you ultimately help yourself. You create a better life not only for yourself, but for everyone around you as well. I hope you enjoyed this powerful episode. I enjoyed it. Until next time. Keep leveling up. Take care.

Important Links:

• Cherry Street Investments
• Facebook – Kavitha Baratakke
• Auction.com
• Purely Passive Investor Group – Facebook
• Purely Passive Investing – Meetup
• CherryStreetInvestments.com/resources
• CherryStreetInvestments.com/webinars

About Kavitha Baratakke

Kavitha Baratakke, a principal at Cherry Street Investments is an Austin-based Real Estate investor and a full-time Multifamily Sponsor with over 10 years of investing experience in single-family and multi-family real estate. Before real estate, she spent 19+ years as a Technology Professional working for IBM and Atlassian in various roles across Software Development, Customer Services, Partner Relations, and Technical Account Management.

She brings strong analytical, problem-solving and presentation skills from her technology background to real-estate. Kavitha is invested in over $100m/2200+ doors worth of assets as a Limited Partner and over $80m of assets as a General Partner. She is primarily focused on Multifamily but is actively exploring other asset classes as well. Besides syndications, Kavitha actively helps investors & business owners set up “Life Insurance Banking Policies”. She’s also a realtor specialized in the Central TX region and Austin, TX in particular.

Kavitha is passionate about educating investors and helping them on their journey toward financial freedom. She hosts regular webinars on various investment strategies, tax planning, and other investment-related topics, featuring high-quality speakers from around the country. She connects with her investors through her “Purely Passive Investor Group” Facebook group and “Cherry Street Investments” Youtube Channel. When she’s not working on real estate, she enjoys spending time with her teenage daughter.

Anya and two puppies – Milo and Oreo, dancing salsa and bachata (her favorite dance), cooking her favorite dish, jumping off a cliff, traveling the world (38 countries and counting…), exploring new cultures, countries, and food, doing long bike rides like MS-150 or hiking her favorite trails in the Texas Hill Country.

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