Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, and to improve overall as a person, this is the podcast you should be listening to. Please remember to subscribe, give a rating, and a review by the end of this episode. Today, I am joined by Yannick Cudjoe-Virgil. He is the principal of Merlynn Acquisitions.
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a private real estate equity firm that helps athletes, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who's interested in investing and diversifying their portfolio. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Yannick. Hi. Hey, how are you? I'm good. Good to have you here. I've been waiting to speak to someone like you, but before that, please tell our listeners a bit of your background.
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I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on this show. A little bit about me. My name is Yannick Cudjoe-Virgil. I'm a former linebacker for the Tennessee Titans, turned real estate investor and syndicator. And what I do professionally now after the sport of football is I run a private equity firm. We specialize in acquiring apartment buildings, multifamily, and we help everyday professionals, busy professionals, business owners, people who are looking for an accretive return in real estate to diversify their portfolio. So.
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Happy to be on the show today. I'm glad that you're here. First of all, let's talk about your football career, because that's where a lot of things started. My background came from being an immigrant from Trinidad. I came over here when I was about 10 years old and fell in love with the sport of football. Watched it as a youth. Fortunately, I was good enough to play college. I played linebacker at the university of Maryland, which is a division one school. And then fortunately I got the chance to move on to the NFL.
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live out my dreams and play linebacker for the Tennessee Titans. For me, my career ended early. Unfortunately, I had a knee injury. You know, I had to walk away from the game. It was challenging. This is something that's being talked about in the professional athlete space, finding a sense of identity outside of the game. Your entire life, you're known as this great athlete. You get a lot of special treatment to some degree for being an athlete and your skills on the field.
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But when the game ends, it's kind of like an identity loss. And so finding the next step for me was certainly not easy, but luckily, you know, I stumbled upon a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. And that transformed my thinking 100% because the month prior to that, I spent about $20,000 in one month and I had no idea what I spent it on. Just spending the money? Yeah, clubs, going out. Just having fun as a-
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22 year old, right? And so for me, that book was very monumental in just my thinking process. At that time, I was rehabbing my knee injury. A lot of changes were happening organizationally with the Titans. I knew that I had to make a change because I didn't know if I was going to get healthy again, be able to get back on the field. And so one thing I did not want to do is be a statistic.
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70 something percent of athletes go broke than three years after the league. I think some of that is changing, but I did not wanna be the statistic of someone who was able to go to the NFL and go broke. And so reading Rich Dad Poor Dad was monumental because it taught me about money, finances, and what I'm doing today, real estate. That's a little bit about my story and how I got to where I am today. That is testament of how knowledge and books can really change lives.
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I think the first time I read Rich Dad Poor Dad was not long after it was released. Robert Kiyosaki was going on talk shows like Oprah. Now you live in Maryland. Correct. Is that where your real estate business is based? Yes. We are currently investing in Baltimore, Maryland, in a market that historically been a cashflow market. It has robust foundations for growth in this market.
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home to me. And so what better way to invest in your community and also get some great compelling returns to invest in Baltimore, Maryland. So that's where all of our properties are located at this time. Back to all 70% of athletes retiring broke after three years. When I've heard these stories, I've always wondered what are the reasons? Is it because they give their money to accountants who are scrupulous? I've even heard of Rihanna. She's not an athlete, but her accountant ran away with
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I think the common thread of hearing a lot of these stories centers around two things. First thing is education. Think about just the professional athlete space. You know, a lot of those athletes are not educated on finances and it's something that is changing a lot from social media programs that are out there to educate the modern day athlete. So I would expect that statistic to swing a little bit in a more positive light.
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The second thing is just how the culture works in a sense from being in a circle, being in a fraternity and one person referring business to the same person. And then the next person referring business to the same person. No athletes kind of talk a lot around each other. Right. And so if one person provides services for that athlete, that athlete would recommend that person to that specific person who's providing the service. And so now you have this network of athletes working with this one professional.
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And that is why you see a lot of headlines where you see one bad actor involved with ton of professional athletes because of that network dynamic that I just mentioned. I think athletes are starting to pay attention more to their finances. They're starting to get more educated on overall how to manage their money and spend their money and invest. People are paying a little bit more attention and doing more due diligence on that professional that they're hiring. So I think there's some positivity that's coming out of this.
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as we continue to get these athletes educated. Even when we were watching TV, you watch Cribs. They show the house and then they show the cars. But ask ourselves, why would you have 20 of them in different colors? Isn't one Lamborghini enough to have the feeling of driving a Lamborghini? Why do you think that they do that? The best way to kind of think about it is putting myself in that shoes, right? A lot of...
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professional athletes, which is predominantly, let's talk about the football space or NBA, predominantly African-American, those guys come from poverty neighborhoods, being on food stamps, not having the money, right? And so when you go from being a broke college student to what I call an overnight millionaire, and you don't have that foundation, that economic and that financial discipline of what to do with your money, that's a recipe for disaster. When you grow up not being able to afford a lot of stuff,
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and all of a sudden you have millions of dollars, but you just start to think about everything that I can get with this money. That's a sentiment that a lot of athletes have had in the past or some still do. Think that's a reason for that, honestly. You mentioned identity earlier. Do you think it's also attached to that? I do think that as well, specifically in the professional athlete space or even in the entertainer space, there's an identity that you have to somewhat create for yourself because now you're in a different circle.
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can't be driving a Honda Civic around someone who makes millions of dollars, right? I kind of liken it to just being around your circle. People wanna do business or people want to naturally be around people like them. And so hanging around a multimillionaire that's driving a Lamborghini and you pulling up with a Toyota. It just doesn't make sense here, right? It's part of the identity, it's part of the perception, it's part of the culture. And so that's the reason why people go out there and the first thing that they probably buy is a car.
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right, because they want to be included into that space, that circle. Right. I remember growing up, you know, when MC Hammer blew up with you can touch this, one moment he was building this huge house in Oakland. And then not long after that, he was filing for bankruptcy. And they said he had 80 people on his entourage. He was paying salaries. He had no idea what they were doing around him. What causes that? Cause I think some athletes as well would have just these people lingering by you.
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I think that's part of the reason the money goes. You grew up with a lot of these folks. You know, some of them have helped you get to the next level. To some degree, it's a feeling like, hey, you owe them something because you got to this level together, or they contributed some portion of their life towards your success. It's kind of like on an airplane, right? If something happens, you put the life jacket on yourself before helping someone else, right? Yeah.
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That has always been my motto, even when I was playing professionally is making sure that I'm taking care of first and foremost, myself and my family, parents, you know, that's important to me. And then everybody else gets the leftover, right? Nobody's out there taking the hits. Nobody's out here dealing with the injuries, the pressures from performance and having to keep your job. And so that's how I approach the situation. Charity certainly does begin at home. Now there's a new series documentary called rich and shameless.
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And one of the episodes, I don't know if you remember him, but he was Brian Williams. He played for the Chicago Bulls in the early nineties. It was around the Jordan era. They used to call him. You had Jordan, you had Pippen, Dennis Rodman first and then Brian Williams. And then he changed his name to Bison Diller for those who might've remembered him much later. Shaq was one of the people they interviewed and Shaq spoke about how he was so savvy with his money back in the early nineties. I think he had a little car.
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one house and a boat. He loved being in the ocean. Unfortunately, that's where he was discovered. But Shaq said, I used to look at this guy and think he only has one car. I had 20 Lamborghinis in my driveway. I remember him saying, Bison Diller was more the exception than the norm in how he handled his finances. It's good to hear that you're saying that's becoming more the norm than the exception. Yeah, no, I think with the inclusion of social media,
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having access to financial advice at the palm of your fingertips. We have role models out there like LeBron James, who is doing exceptionally well off the field. You see the things that he's doing in business. I think he just became the first athlete billionaire, you know, for his investments, things like Blaze Pizza and his partnerships. He is arguably the model athlete in today's environment. Everyone is looking to model his moves.
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talk about the late great Kobe Bryant and things that he did off the field as well. Another billionaire. Yes. Exactly. You know, people are modeling the greats. Magic is a billionaire. Yes. Yeah. And as I mentioned, athletes tend to follow other athletes. That's all we really needed was being able to expose the athletes to what they should do. What's good for them as well in the long term for them and their families. Now let's talk about Merlin acquisitions. How did you get started on that?
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When I got injured, I had to figure out what was the next move. And Rich Dad, Poor Dad opened my mind to just finance his money in real estate. I got into real estate because I wanted the same financial freedom that I had when, you know, I was playing in the NFL. And I think that anyone out there can achieve financial freedom through real estate investing. How I define financial freedom is simply just having enough free cashflow to offset your everyday expenses.
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Cause that's essentially what the average worker in America is working for, right? Is to earn a living, right? To pay their bills, take care of their children, take care of their family. And yeah, so real estate is one of those investments where you can take small amounts of capital and just compile that over time to build a real estate portfolio and create the financial freedom for you and your family. For me, real estate was the perfect opportunity to leverage my experience in the sports space from being able to.
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manage teams because real estate is a team sport. You have to have different players on your teams to be successful in real estate. It's not a one person show, right? So being able to find the right professionals to be successful is a skill that everyone needs to have when they're investing in real estate. So for me, it was an opportunity to invest in an appreciating asset that provides cashflow to create financial freedom for myself. So that's how I got into real estate. You created your own cashflow quadrant. Exactly.
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Exactly. And that's another Robert Kiyosaki mantra. My background as well is I used to work for a couple of private equity firms. I quit my job by having enough free cashflow from my rental portfolio to offset what I was being paid in the, let's call it the W-2 space, right? Being an everyday working professional. You know, that is what I define financial freedom as. It's not a very common definition. And the reason I asked
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We were talking about shiny object syndrome earlier. A lot of these online, let me coach you into financial freedom. All I talk about, you're gonna be in the Maldives. You're gonna make the kind of money you could win in the lottery. And that's what they define as financial freedom. And that's what people take in. I really like the way you put it because it means one, it's attainable. Sometimes people, when they hear these other shiny object definitions of financial freedom, it looks unattainable for...
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most people. Yeah, yeah, I think if anyone is looking for a get rich quick scheme, that is a recipe for disaster. I haven't seen much get rich quick opportunities out there that actually help people get rich quick. To your point of the $30,000 programs and things that are out there. The biggest thing that I would look for is just performing due diligence on that person. I would agree that value is something that depends on what you think of it, right? What it can offer you.
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And so if you feel like that 30,000 would create that value that you're looking for, definitely do the due diligence on that person. Try to get, you know, reviews from anyone that's in that program. If someone is unable to provide referrals or people who can forgive healthy reviews that have actually gone through their process, look the other way and run fast. If you're selling a product that costs $30,000, I definitely need to have some surety that there's a route to get that outcome that I'm looking for.
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Right. So or something of value that is worth more than the 30,000. Absolutely. Are you familiar with the app clubhouse? Yes. I don't get into all the rooms, obviously, but I remember sometimes just when you read the topics, I've seen quite a few of the ones that say $3,000 get started on real estate investing. Is that realistic? Or is that a scam? I think some might be.
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antics and can appear somewhat scammy just to try to drive attention to it. People to come into those rooms. Then I also think there are also opportunities out there to buy properties for discounted prices. And obviously realistically, let's say somewhere like Detroit, where the market is, you know, maybe softer, or you can get cheaper properties out there is somewhere where you may be able to buy something for $3,000 and obviously might be dilapidated.
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versus a New York property where you can't even get a piece of dirt for that. Right. There are opportunities out there where you can get properties for three, $5,000. And those opportunities might be buying tax liens from your city, getting equitable interest in that property through tax liens and going through the foreclosure process to actually acquire the property. There are opportunities out there to buy properties, so to speak, at those discounted prices. It just comes down to the strategy, realistic expectations on that particular strategy.
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At the end of the day, real estate is one of those things where value appreciates over time. Yes, there are opportunities out there where you have a chance to acquire properties for that low buy-in entry. For us, our investors are busy professionals, everyday people working a job and have money in the bank that they're looking to diversify from the stock market. The reason I like real estate is because of the predictability of returns and outcome as well versus the stock market where one day you might be up.
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politician that says something or the company, their sales go down and all of a sudden, you drop 10%, whereas in real estate, there's more empirical data to show exactly what you're gonna get in that specific product. And then the cashflow as well is something that comes every month specifically in residential real estate. I'm sure that you've been aware of the housing market across the country, supply is extremely constrained. People can't afford to buy homes, to start a home.
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price has gone up about 28% or so within the past 12 months. And so people can't afford to buy a house in today's environment. And so they're forced to rent. And so the demand for rentals, apartments that we look for is extremely robust for the foreseeable future just because of that supply and demand imbalance that's out there in the market right now. We love real estate. It has done well for us and we're gonna.
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continue to bring opportunities to foreign investors and grow our wealth together. With the supply and demand of real estate right now, I have a friend who is a real estate agent, and he says they don't have enough stock on the list for rentals. This is Chicago. Can you imagine how many apartments we have? But there's not enough for them to cater to people who are looking for rentals. That's very interesting. The US is in a housing crisis. I mean, during the last recession,
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halted home building. And so there's millions of houses that are in backlog just because people are looking for homes and we just haven't been able to keep up with the demand for the past 10 years. During the pandemic, it just exacerbated the housing pressures that we've had prior to the pandemic. Essentially the natures behind the pandemic, people wanted to move out of small confined areas and get into single family properties. We had low interest rates that-
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When you have low interest rates out there in the market, that's always a key ingredient for investing. And so people are able to afford way more than they would otherwise prior to the pandemic. And so housing prices, you know, skyrocketed. When you take a look at housing prices compared to wage growth and some of those other economic factors, there's a huge imbalance. My outlook is that it's going to be extremely difficult to get a start a home.
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for the foreseeable future, unless the government starts to maybe subsidize first time home buyers to be able to get into those properties, also help investors build more efficiently, subsidize development costs as well. The other thing that people don't know about is that institutional companies, big private equity firms who have historically invested in commercial real estate, apartment buildings, et cetera, they are now buying up single family homes. Take a look at stories like Zillow,
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what happened with them and their investment in single-family homes that collapsed and other institutional players who are investing in this. About 2% of single-family homes in America today are owned by institutional companies. The rest are owned by what we call mom and pop operators, just everyday Americans. Family, yeah. But now we have this influx of capital that's coming into the single-family space because of such demand, that's attributing as well to the rise in prices.
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And when you think about the overall wealth of your everyday American, much of their wealth is tied into their homes. And so that's another paradigm that we are looking at right now is what is going to happen with the wealth, the ability for someone to buy a home in America today. So there are a lot of things that are impacting the demand for rental housing. It's something to look at and to pay attention to in today's environment. Commercial real estate.
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Yeah, apartments, anything that is five units and more is considered commercial. And so that's what we do. We are commercial real estate investors and we buy these apartments that we can create revenue from and renovate and increase the rents to provide a consistent return for our investors. Your clientele, what's the income bracket? Somebody listened to you and say, Oh, I don't have the kind of money that athletes make, so obviously I cannot invest in this firm.
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Most of our investors are business owners, busy professionals, people who are in their careers and maybe have nice sum amount in the stock market and looking to diversify. So a lot of times when you get into these private equity investments, the minimums can range from maybe 30,000 to 100,000 depending on the size of the deal. And so that's the great thing about what we do is syndications, right? And just in the simplest form is basically
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we use the SEC laws to provide opportunities for everyday professionals to invest in. The beauty of that is being able to bring real estate opportunities to investors who would not be able to see these deals without having structures that the government has put in place to allow everyday people to invest in institutional quality assets. Because historically prior to the Tax, Guts and Jobs Act,
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A lot of those opportunities were just for high net worth investors because you see these deals in small, close-knit communities. Right. Anyone that is a regular business owner, W2 worker, or even a professional athlete, to invest with you is something that we are happy to do because we provide tax benefits, cash flow. We help people generate wealth through real estate. So you do all the due diligence, the hard work, which a business professional or entrepreneur doesn't have time.
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Exactly. We are the operators. We handle everything from start to finish. Our job for our investor is just to collect the check. What a nice way to live. Just collecting checks. Right, exactly. Which I'm sure like you described, financial freedom. That is what we're all aiming for, to not be slaves to our jobs. And speaking of jobs, with a great resignation in the last two years with COVID. With a great resignation, you know, had a lot of time to sit back and think,
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There were a lot of opportunities out there to invest in. People had more money from just the stimulus packages that were being pumped into the economy, which obviously has led to the inflation issue that we're dealing with today. When you have that, a lot of time, I mean, that's what employees don't want. They want people to just work. They don't want you to have time in your hands. Exactly, they don't want you to get smarter. The US is not in the business of producing entrepreneurs, and that's a different conversation for another day, talking about educational curriculums.
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Employers don't want employees to have a bunch of time in their hands, right? And the stimulus money that was in the economy, people investing and paying attention to other opportunities that would allow them to make money likely had some sort of impact on the great resignation, right? And people wanting to have flexibility and being able to control their futures and their outcome. And that's essentially what, you know, making investments can do and entrepreneurship can do. Yeah. It was an interesting time for the past 12 to 24 months.
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Oh, yes. Certainly a lot of reflecting and thinking, do I really want to do this? Which people didn't have time for before. Yeah. Yannick tell our listeners if they want to invest, what are the criteria that they should meet in order to know whether they qualify to even be part of your clientele? We enjoy bringing passive opportunities to our investors. Our client is anyone who is looking for a diversified return in real estate, who's looking for something more predictable.
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who is looking to utilize the tax benefits that real estate offers to offset some of their business income or other passive income that they have, our clients are just everyday people. And we don't necessarily have any stringent criteria. Obviously we don't want anyone to invest their last dime into an investment opportunity. You never want to invest anything that you aren't prepared to lose in a sense. For us, it's about bringing quality, cash flowing opportunities to our investors
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help them achieve the wealth goals that they want for themselves and their family. And again, we talk about financial freedom and we talk about creating your own destiny and real estate is the perfect opportunity to do that as well. So we enjoy doing what we do and I'm happy to speak with anyone that's out there looking for any passive real estate investing opportunities. Please define financial freedom again, I like it. It's a financial freedom is just having enough income to offset your everyday expenses.
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to create the lifestyle that you want and not have to worry about going to work every day. Which is a dream that most of us have. So before you go, please tell us where to reach you and where we get all the information on how to get started on real estate. Absolutely, absolutely. So again, our company is Merlynn Acquisitions and our website is simply merlin, M-E-R-L-Y-N-N, acquisitions.com.
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And on there, you know, we have an ebook, how to get started in real estate, why multifamily is a great investment opportunity. We have educational resources like a due diligence checklist. If anyone is out there looking for their own real estate opportunities, specifically in multifamily. If anyone is interested, feel free to join our investor group to get more information about the opportunities that we have for our company. So thank you so much for having me on this platform. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for being here. I really was educated on this topic.
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One last question. Remember the 2008 financial crisis? Yep. Do the principles taught in rich, dead, poor, dead, could they apply to those situations or it was just bad all around? Absolutely, absolutely. Just for anyone that doesn't know what exactly happened in the last financial crisis, basically it all centered around the lenders issuing a bunch of bad loans, right? I mean, you can get up tomorrow and buy a house. And so...
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Obviously when you're issuing a bunch of bad loans out there in the market and people can't afford it, that's a recipe for disaster. The principles and rich dad, poor dad definitely can help you navigate through just understanding investing basics and fundamentals, why you need to invest in the right market, why you need to invest in an asset that's appreciated, why you need to not over-leverage yourself in real estate. I think the last financial crisis was something that is maybe an anomaly, right?
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because it was a situation where the government just issued a bunch of bad loans. But I think in today's economy where we are today, lending requirements are much more stringent. And the dynamics behind the housing market today is much more stronger than again, we have been under building for the past 10 years. And so I don't see any sort of real estate crash happening for the foreseeable future, but more so rather a correction at best.
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because $20,000 over asking here, $50,000 over asking there, right? It's not healthy for any market. And so I would expect the real estate market as a whole to stabilize with also knowing that not all locations are created equal, but as a real estate market as a whole, I would expect some sort of stabilization because rates have gone up, et cetera. Between the last real estate cycle, last financial crisis versus now, two different situations, the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, great way to...
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get some foundational knowledge on just the principles of investing in real estate. Thank you very much. Yannick Cudjoe-Virgil for being here today. Thank you. If you've been listening, I'm sure that you know exactly what to do to get started. Go to marylandacquisitions.com in order to know how to get started on real estate investing. And if you have met the minimum criteria of investing in real estate, but don't have the time, you're a busy athlete or entrepreneur,
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Please contact Yannick's company in order to get started and diversify your portfolio. Thank you very much.