ty-building efforts make Elevate’s properties stand out, Abreu said. For example, he said, at one property Elevate recently bought, renovations included fixing the pool, which had been out of commission for the past four or five years. The property management team hosted a grand re-opening pool party for residents. The goal is to have community events at least once each quarter, Abreu said, and the results have been encouraging: Most new resi- dents to his properties come from referrals. “That says a lot when you have residents that are living there and they like it so much that they are telling others to come and move there,” he said.
Big multifamily investing is definitely a team game, and there’s a lot of partnerships that allowyou to learn from others and get into deals sooner.””
JORGEABREU
decided to focus solely on multifamily investing, and in 2018, he and Bodiwala started Elevate to do just that. Today, Elevate owns more than 4,300 doors and is quickly closing in on its goal of 5,000 for this year. Next year, Abreu hopes to increase that to 10,000 doors. The company manages about $325 million in assets. He said they look for properties with more than 100 units—with 200-plus being their sweet spot—primarily in “land- lord-friendly states that we can see the growth in popu- lation and the economy.” Texas is Elevate’s main market, and it also owns properties in Georgia, Oklahoma and South Dakota. The team is looking to expand to other markets, such as Florida and the Carolinas, he said. “We’re pretty open to finding the deal wherever it’s at,” he said. Elevate started its business doing Class C value-add properties. Abreu said having the construction company in-house “gives us the confidence to go after some heavi - er lifts and hairier deals. We’ve been able to strike some really good purchase prices by doing that.” It also lever- ages the construction company to build new multifamily properties, he said. Last year, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Abreu said his team realized the value in diversifying to add some Class B and Class A properties to the mix. They continue to pro- vide value-add to each property, but he said these don’t require as much work as other projects they’ve taken on in the past. “Now we do it all, and we found that our investors have the appetite for all of them,” he said.
BUILDING COMMUNITY Elevate aims to add value not only for its investors but for its residents. It makes an extra effort to invest in the communities at its properties, and those communi-
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