Don't Buy Apartments,
Buy THIS Instead
In this episode, I break down why multifamily real estate might be the worst place to invest in 2025—and what asset classes are actually delivering results right now. From self-storage to flex space developments to NNN triple net leases, I’ll show you the real deals I’m buying, how we’re operating them, and why they’re outperforming apartments in cash flow, stability, and scalability.
I walk through a 105-unit self-storage deal we acquired in Madison, TN, where we went from 58% to over 80% occupancy in just 60 days—no renovations, no headaches, just smart operations.
Get commercial real estate coaching, courses, and community to jumpstart your investment journey over at CRE Central: www.crecentral.com
Key Takeaways:
Apartments are overcrowded, overpriced, and not the guaranteed path to financial freedom many believe.
Alternative investment strategies like self-storage, flex spaces, industrial outdoor storage, and triple net properties can offer:
More stable cash flow
Less management hassle
Lower tenant turnover
Potentially higher returns
Real investment success isn't about accumulating the most "doors" but finding the right assets that:
Generate consistent income
Require minimal day-to-day management
Provide flexibility and peace of mind
Successful investors like Ryan Stackhouse demonstrated that pivoting from multifamily to other commercial real estate can:
Reduce operational stress
Create more personal freedom
Allow more time for family and personal interests
The overarching message is to be open-minded, seek alternative investment strategies, and focus on assets that truly provide financial and personal freedom.
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Episode Transcript:
Tyler Cauble 0:00
You know, it's funny after my last video, don't waste your time buying apartments. I got a lot of comments. Stuff like, retail is risky. Flex spaces sit empty. Industrial tenants can hurt my feelings too. And look, I get it. If you've spent any time around real estate investing, you've probably been told that apartments are the safest, surest path for you to get financial freedom. But what if that isn't true anymore, at least not right now. What if chasing multifamily right now could actually be the thing that is holding you back? Because here's the reality, you're not walking into a gold mine when you buy apartments today. You're diving into the reddest of red oceans. It's overcrowded, overpriced and oversold, and the biggest myth of all, the one almost every new investor falls for more doors equals more freedom. If you just buy enough duplexes, triplexes or apartment units, then you'll finally have that passive income lifestyle, the one where you wake up whenever you want, you travel the world with your family, and you live stress free, yeah, except it rarely plays out that way. I've seen it firsthand in my own portfolio and with the hundreds of investors that I've worked with, you don't build real freedom by stacking doors. You build real freedom by owning the right assets, the ones that actually pay you without eating all of your time, draining you of all your energy and taking away your peace of mind. And today I'm going to show you exactly what that looks like. We're going to break down what I'm buying instead of apartments, the exact numbers and why this path, while it's way less crowded, has completely outperformed multifamily for me, for my students and for other smart investors out there who are just tired of fighting over scraps, and if you stayed to the end, I'm also going to introduce you to a few folks like Ryan Marcus and Ron who have pivoted away from apartments completely and transformed their investment portfolios and their lives. So let's dive in.
Tyler Cauble 2:00
All right, so let's talk about one of the real deals that I am working on right now, a 105 unit self storage facility in Madison, Tennessee. We raised capital from our investors and bought it for $1.7 million earlier this year. And here's why this deal stood out. First off, we bought it at a price where the cash flow makes sense from day one, not based on some crazy pro forma, like a lot of apartments not based on praying for rent growth, like a lot of apartments actual cash in the bank, plus we had some vacancy that we could go and fill on top of all of that. Now, when we took it over, occupancy was around 58% we had some rough spots to clean up for sure, seven delinquent units, deferred maintenance, no real systems in place for rent collection. But here's the thing, this wasn't that complicated. It wasn't about adding granite countertops or hoping for $300 rent bumps like you'd have to do in the apartment world. It was basic operational fixes. We got the rent rolls transitioned over. We started automating payments. So simple, we began the legal process to auction off delinquent units, and within 60 days, we were already on track to push occupancy over 80% without lifting a hammer or spending a fortune. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, very profitable. And the best part of that is that this facility isn't just throwing off solid cash flow, it's giving us real options for the future, because once we stabilize it at that higher occupancy. We've got multiple exit strategies. We could refinance and pull some cash out. We could sell it for a higher cap rate, or we could just keep it and cash flow it with very little management needed on a day to day basis. Compare that to buying a Class C apartment complex right now, where you're probably paying close to a 5% cap rate. You're managing 100 sometimes very angry tenants, fielding maintenance calls and praying that insurance rates just don't go up again. That's not freedom, at least not to me. That is another job with more risk baked in with this self storage facility that I'm doing, I'm building real wealth quietly without having to fight in a red ocean. And the crazy part is this isn't just possible with self storage. You don't have to box yourself into a single asset class anymore. The opportunities right now stretch way beyond that, across asset classes that most investors aren't even paying attention to take Marcus, for example. Marcus built a brand new flex space development outside of Birmingham, Alabama, but he didn't just throw up a metal building, and call it a day. He went high end brick facade, premium lighting, luxury vinyl plank floors, even cedar overhangs. I mean, come on, look at that, all the details that most developers cheap out on, and because of that, every single bay was leased out in under two months. No negotiation on rents, no tenant turnover games. He didn't have to race to the bottom, because he built a better product, and now he's pulling top of market rents with virtually no vacancy risk, while everybody else is still wondering whether generic flex buildings are probably sitting empty. Mark has created his own blue ocean. Then there's Ron. Ron's focused on industrial outdoor storage iOS. He buys industrially zoned land, puts up a. Fence, installs some lighting and leases it to trucking companies by the month. No fancy build outs, no complicated construction at one site, Ron turned a rundown office building and a dirt lot into a cash flow machine, stacking trucks on the yard, leasing maintenance bays, even charging for amenities like tire removal and because he bought in a fast growing industrial corridor that win could easily be worth two to three times more just within the next few years. Strong monthly cash flow now, massive upside later. It's one of the most overlooked, flexible strategies in commercial real estate today. And then there's Ryan. Ryan was deep in the multifamily game, dozens of units, constant management headaches, constant turnover. On paper, he looked successful and he was but behind the scenes, he was chained to the business until he shifted into triple net investing. Now, instead of babysitting tenants, Ryan owns assets like a corporate AT and T building in Chattanooga, where the tenant pays the taxes, the insurance and the maintenance on the property, all he does is collect checks and occasionally renew a lease. Not too bad. Today, Ryan's portfolio is worth 10s of millions of dollars, and his investments run quietly in the background while he spends more time traveling with his family and living life on his own terms. Ryan's story hits close to home for a lot of investors, because for a long time, Ryan did exactly what he was supposed to do. He built a portfolio of single family homes, then he scaled into multi family, more doors, more tenants, more management, more headache. And at first it looked like it was working. The unit count was growing, the portfolio value was growing, the revenue was growing, but so were the headaches. He was stuck putting out fires and managing evictions, dealing with maintenance emergencies at all hours, chasing rents from tenants who were one bad month away from defaulting. And the bigger his portfolio got, the more it felt like his portfolio owned him, not the other way around. That's when he realized that something had to change. He started studying commercial real estate differently, maybe because we had a coffee back in 2018 and I told him that he should be investing in Triple Net Properties instead. So he stopped chasing doors and started chasing better tenants and better deals, deals where the tenants were businesses, not individuals. Deals where the income was secured by long term leases, not month to month or annual uncertainties, deals where the buildings could basically run themselves. And that's when he made the pivot into triple net investing. Now let's hear it from Ryan himself.
Speaker 1 7:24
Hey guys, my name is Ryan Stackhouse. I currently live in South Padre Island, Texas. Tyler and I met in Nashville, Tennessee, where I lived for 10 years. I went from buying single family homes to apartments, and then sold all of our apartments, and now we own triple net, absolute net lease, mostly industrial, but we own some medical treatment facilities, doctor's offices, things like that.
Tyler Cauble 7:51
At what point did you realize that multifamily wasn't going to give you the freedom that you wanted? I'd say
Speaker 1 7:57
three or four years in to owning, you know, we were up to, like, 450 units or so, and I just saw no consistency with it. We started with multi family with the intent of getting free of the rat race. You know, I had enough equity in these single family residences to trade into apartments or trade into another asset class that would give us, you know, some level of financial freedom. And what I started learning was it was just a glorified single family formula. You know, you'd have years where, yeah, sure, profitability was good, and then the next year, you know, got to replace a roof, or got to replace many HVAC units, or have lots of vacancy in that year basically wiped out all the NOI from the year before. So we wanted something more stable.
Tyler Cauble 8:47
Was there a specific moment or breaking point when you knew you had to make that shift?
Speaker 1 8:52
I think everybody that that's a successful investor will tell you it's it's pain that makes you change. I got tired of writing checks, you know, for repairs, or having vacancies, or all the things that come along with apartments in our triple net and absolute net lease space. I mean, they'll send me the invoice. I pay the invoice, and I'm done. It's literally like a five minute thing, you know, I'm not dealing with looking at spreadsheets every month to see what did it cost me for the roll off dumpster this month. You know, it's just vastly different.
Tyler Cauble 9:23
How did you discover triple net investing as an alternative to multifamily? You
Speaker 1 9:27
You were always talking about, Ryan, you need to start doing triple net, absolute net. You need to do different kinds of commercial. And I was always like, oh, yeah, yeah, I hear you, whatever. And I was dead set on apartments, just because that's what I had kind of focus my energy and time and money towards but I started seeing the light after a few years doing it myself. I'm the type of person. I got to do stuff the hard way. I got to learn things on my own before I'm totally convinced. And I learned pretty quickly that you were right, the triple net, absolute net lease space. Especially industrial. I really love industrial these days, the tenant improvement so when you own a building and it goes vacant, you get a new tenant that comes in, usually they'll request some sort of tenant improvement budget. I'm finding in the industrial space that's minimal to nothing. We own an office space down in Mobile, Alabama, and we're finding on that one, even we found it a call center. And since it's already set up and as an office, we don't need to do any TI and that tends to be the case on our industrial properties. So I love that. You know, with medical buildings, that is not the case. A lot of times you're paying to 250, 300 a square foot to do a TI improvement for a surgery center or a doctor's office just to get it all set up for them. And that gets very
Tyler Cauble 10:46
costly. What changed in your day to day life after switching to triple net investments? Well, I
Speaker 1 10:50
retired. I'm doing more important work, which is raising my kids. My kids are little, and it's more important to me to spend quality time with them, and I also get to I get to surf almost every day. I get to go scuba diving. I ride my bike. That's the stuff that I'm never going to regret later on, when I'm in my 80s, 90s, you know, looking back on my life saying, I wish I would have what
Tyler Cauble 11:16
advice would you give to somebody watching this video who's feeling stuck in apartments right
Speaker 1 11:20
now, I would say, open up your mind. Talk to other people that are doing other asset classes, like triple net, absolute net, especially in the industrial space. It's it's a small niche, and I really love that too, because there's way less competition than in the apartment world. When you're going after a deal, I would say find people that are doing and living the way you want to live. And learn from those people, because I'm investment agnostic. You show me a better investment. I'm all ears.
Tyler Cauble 11:49
What Ryan figured out, and what most investors never do, is that this game isn't about buying the most properties. Who cares about how many doors you have? You're just one smart deal away one overlooked property in a sub market that no one's paying attention to, that ends up changing everything. That's the kind of work that we're doing inside the Siri accelerator. It's not a theory heavy course. It's on a bunch of fluff or recycled tactics from 2012 it's a step by step blueprint paired with real time coaching from me and feedback from other people who are actually out there doing deals right now, we help you build consistent deal flow, underwrite opportunities the right way, and get into the kind of assets that actually give you back your time, your freedom and your peace of mind, just like Marcus, just like Ron, just like Ryan. So if you're ready to stop chasing what's familiar and start buying what actually works, this is your invitation. Click the link below to schedule a call with me to learn more, and let's go find you your first or next great deal, because you're not 100 doors away. You're just one deal away from changing your life. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
In this episode, I’m taking you inside our latest deal—a 100,000-square-foot flex space property at Friars Crossing in Chattanooga, TN—and sharing why we’ve stopped chasing multifamily altogether.
I’m joined by Dave Codre from Greenleaf out of Atlanta as we break down why flex industrial has become our top target for 2025. From smaller tenant suites that keep vacancy low, to flexible layouts that let us reposition space fast, we’re seeing real advantages over apartments.