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Jason Yarusi is the founder of Yarusi Holdings with his wife Pili. They have acquired $100M in real estate across 1100 Multifamily Units since 2017. He is an avid ultra runner and workout enthusiast. Hosts The Multifamily Live Podcast and The Jason and Pili Project (podcast).
Jason is also the founder of the New Jersey Multifamily Live Club with over 2,000 members that focuses on Real Estate Syndication and Multifamily Investing and trains others on the success formula for buying apartment buildings. Jason opens up about his journey into entrepreneurship that spanned starting and exiting multiple businesses in the past 15 years.
His family construction business was the start to where he is today and how his success has elevated. The multifamily industry is a challenging and rewarding one. It takes patience, innovation skills, strategic thinking to be successful in this business and Jason has proven to do so! Jason’s wealth strategy is a personal and professional success story that will inspire you.
He shares how he improved himself as an individual, which gave him the strength to take on bigger challenges in his business. He is a motivator and guide through the perils of personal success, who achieves professional goals with self-awareness. In this episode we’ll hear from Jason and his insights that will empower your life!
In This Episode
- Jason Yarusi’s personal and professional background.
- His pieces of wealth strategy and multifamily approach.
- The incredible athletic journey and determination.
- His strong mindset to being an amazing husband, father and entrepreneur.
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. Today, we’re joined by Jason Yarusi. Jason is an active real estate syndicator and investor. Jason and his wife, Peely, founded Yarusi Holdings, a multi-family investment firm with over 1,100 units under management since 2017. The firm repositions properties through operational efficiencies, renovations, and complete rebranding. Jason also hosts the Multi-Family Live podcast, which provides actionable content and tools to build and strengthen your multi-family business. Jason is the founder of the New Jersey Multi-Family Live Club with over 2,000 members, focusing on real estate syndication and multi-family investing. He also trains others on the success formula for buying apartment buildings. Jason has started and exited multiple businesses in the past 15 years, and his family construction business has a niche industry position in raising and moving structures. The company has elevated over 2,000 homes in the last seven years. Beyond real estate, Jason spends time with his wife, Peely, and their three young kids, Luke, Lily, and Leo. He is an avid CrossFitter and now lives in Tennessee. Jason, my friend, so good to see you! Welcome to the show.
Really looking forward to this, man. Yeah, I’m excited to dive in here. I’ve had some updates to our bio, so that was a long wordsmith there of what you just put together. I appreciate you taking the time to set the narrative, but I’m psyched, man. Let’s go.
Yeah, 100%. And for folks who didn’t listen, Jason has a really strong podcast. He welcomed me on his show a few years ago, and it definitely goes down as one of my favorite interviews. We’re definitely like-minded, and Jason is doing some awesome things, so I really look forward to jumping into this. So, why don’t we kick it off with that, Jason? Tell us a little bit more about your background, how you got into real estate and businesses, and of course, we have to jump into fitness ultra-events as well. Let’s start there.
You know, it’s not your traditional path, right? I actually met Peili, my now wife, in New York City back in 2003. She was running a pretty big outdoor New York City bar at the time, and I was there just coming back from working over in Europe. I was looking for a job, a friend of mine had worked there in the past, and they had some construction work to be done. That’s how I first met Peili. Fast forward, it took about 10 years for us to get married, but in between, she had moved back to California and Hawaii, and came back to this bar. I started managing it, and it grew almost 25 times in revenue, becoming the biggest outdoor New York City bar at the time. It was a massively successful place, a ton of fun, and a great learning experience to watch companies grow, expand, and build.
Fast forward, Peili and I get together, and Hurricane Sandy ravages the East Coast. A lot of people in New Jersey had their houses flooded. My dad had this small construction company, where he lifts and moves buildings. He’s done this for a lot of reasons, but one reason is to meet FEMA requirements, hopefully cut down the flood insurance, and prevent the house from ever flooding again. His business, doing 12-13 jobs a year, exploded to thousands of calls in a week because of this storm. My brother was working for me at the time. In the meantime, we had opened some restaurants, opened and sold a brewery, and were doing some other things in New York City, but we decided to go out and help Dad. It was a great experience. My brother came, Peili came out, and we were now a couple. It was the first point of helping Dad to that next piece.
What we knew all along is that, even while we were working with bars, they were service-driven. While it can be fun and rewarding, it’s still “due.” Without the “due,” there is no “get.” If you’re not there doing the construction work, there’s no income, no revenue. Peili was pregnant with our first kid, and we went from working real light to working if we had 25 hours in a day. That’s how busy it was with the construction world. We said, “We have to find a way to get our time back.” That was the most important thing.
We didn’t want to grow up, have our kids, and never be around because we were service-oriented. I had watched my father not be home a lot growing up because of the same thing. These jobs weren’t something you could do in one town. He’d be going to Pennsylvania, all the way to South Jersey, because that’s where the jobs were. He wasn’t home a lot, and I didn’t want that same experience for my kids.
We kept looking at what else was out there, and real estate kept coming to mind. We kept having that conversation that real estate was the path forward, but we didn’t know where to start. We did what we thought was logical: Peili got her real estate license. At the time, we were pregnant with our second kiddo. We started flipping and wholesaling houses, doing some Airbnbs, and quickly learned that while it was going well, we were just adding another service business, another active job. We were busy helping out with construction and had all this other activity on top of it. We were stacking activity and going further away from our goal.
It took Peili meeting someone at a RE event who was doing out-of-state rentals. That was the switch. You could put together a process, a management squad, and an avenue forward that could produce cash flow. That was the first aha moment. We jumped in, started buying duplexes, some twos and threes, and that was going well. But we soon realized that scalability was going to be an efficiency nightmare if we tried to build a portfolio of just duplexes and triplexes all over one city or multiple cities. We kept looking for that next piece and came upon a great podcast, just like this, talking about large apartment investing. That was the aha! That’s it, the piece of the puzzle where we could put all the parts together and operate a business.
Just like restaurants, I had a 12-seat restaurant in New York City. The bar could have 5,000 people there, and both had the same operation. But you get more scalability when you go larger. There’s more economies of scale because you treat it like a business. With large apartment investing, we could buy larger assets with full-time staff to operate them. We could put together an efficient plan to make it a better place to live. We dove all in, selling those two and three units, and dove into large apartment investing. In 2017, we bought our first property, a 94-unit. Since then, we’ve done maybe 16-17 transactions, equating to over 1,500-1,600 units, with another $50-$60 million in the pipeline currently.
Wow, that’s really awesome, Jason. It’s interesting, right? We talk a lot about wealth strategy, and I know we talked about my book when we were on your show as well. It’s interesting how you guys kind of came into this with time being your greatest asset, focusing on that as the cornerstone of your wealth strategy. What else were some pieces of your personal wealth strategy on this journey that you can share?
The bar, I’m not going to say it wasn’t lucrative, but we would work all summer—that’s where it was made. Every single day, all summer, like on a Saturday, you’d get there at 9:00 a.m. and leave at 1:00 a.m. But that was what it took, and it’s just not sustainable. You have to find the time and the ability to do things you want to do today. We think, “I’ll build up and do this today, and then at 65…” But at 65, there’s so much road in between. You can’t designate that at 65 you’ll do all these things.
There’s a window here today. If I want to go jet skiing, there are certain things that will go away from you. If you’re constantly driven by the force now, saying, “I have to do this now, then I’ll get rewarded later,” is that the life you want? We wanted to say, “If I want to go to all my kids’ school activities, their sports activities, any day of the week, why can’t I?” Why does the job have to drive my narrative? We’re one of the few countries where work is who we are. In other countries, it’s not the work that defines us. Here, the common question is, “What do you do for a living?” because that represents us.
We see a loss of identity in people who train all their life for the Olympics or are sports players who have a hard time adapting after. You see the same thing for people who have worked in one corporate job. It can be taken away so easily. Coinbase just laid off 2,000 people, Tesla too. These are people who thought they had sustainability. We have to create our sustainability, a life we can build into, replicate, and enjoy. That’s where we use multifamily for our wealth-building strategy. It allows us to have active income, cash flow, and tax advantages. We’ve started Seven Figure Multifamily, with a great mastermind and members looking to accomplish the same thing.
We always ask, “Can we get more time back?” It’s about making things more efficient. Many things still need work, but as we look at this, we see our investors want the same experience. They want passive income to replace their income, transition fully into real estate, or offset income with appreciation. It’s about what can benefit them too. With wealth strategy, we can’t always think in real time. We can capture what we want to do right now, but we also look outward to what it will provide for our future.
I don’t want to sacrifice moments with my children. You have children, it’s like they grow a foot every day. Saying, “We’ll do that later,” two years go by, and maybe they’re not interested anymore. The moment is now.
Yeah, no, definitely, Jason. I think you really hit on the core of something that’s really the basis of this passive investing thesis. All of us were sold a bill of goods from corporate America, from Wall Street, and it’s all about trading your time for money. They paint this picture of working for 40 years, building up a nest egg, and retiring at 65. Then, like you said, go do all the things you want to do then. But time is actually the greatest currency. By focusing on passive investing, we’re able to gain back time and implement the things we want to do, whether that’s spending time with family, growing our business, or working on our health.
These are the critically important things that lead to living a much more intentional life about what we want to do, versus being reactive and controlled. This really frustrates me, and it’s one of the big points in my book and what I’m trying to share with people. I know you are too, which is why we’re kindred spirits. We help people identify that we were sold a bill of goods, and there is a different way to think about it. You had to go through all those experiences, I went through all these experiences, but how can we circumvent that? How can you learn from our lessons and start earlier?
The greatest thing said to me when something poor happened was, “This too shall pass.” We always think of things as the be-all, end-all. Fast forward five years, and you look back, you probably can’t even remember the event. At that moment, either you’ve grown stronger, but you’ve gotten by it; you’re still living today. I was having a conversation with someone earlier, and he said, “I just don’t like my job, it sucks away my soul. I was out of a job last year and was making more money without it.
Do I step out of my job?” The question comes back to you. I’ve never really had a traditional job; I’ve always found ways to push forward. I’ve always had this inconsistency, which I’ve come to understand. Even when you’re investing, I don’t force investments forward. We find the right investments, whether that’s one a quarter, one every six months, or two a quarter. The market will tell. I’m fine with that narrative because I understand this is our path forward.
My suggestion to that person was, “The choice you make today does not need to be the be-all, end-all. If you leave your job, and in four months, your wife says she’s sick of seeing you every day, or you can’t live with the uncertainty, at least you tried. You can always find another job, but it’s better to know that you tried. It could work out great, which I’m sure it will for this person, because they’re highly intuitive and can put their mind to it. If it doesn’t work out, at least 20 years from now, you can say, ‘At least I knew, at least I took that chance,’ instead of looking back and saying, ‘I wish I took that chance.'” The hardest thing is to look back and say, “What if?” You don’t hear many people complain about all the things they did in their life. It’s usually, “I wish I tried, I wish I went out there to see, to do this,” and now they’re 85 and just can’t.
Right. Now, I have to cite a great little case study here, and I’ve been meaning to connect with you to bring my daughter and connect her with you. She’s been out of school for one year, graduated college just over a year ago. It’s amazing how everything we’re talking about comes down to mindset. Most kids, as your kids get older, are going to follow in their parents’ footsteps. It’s doing all that conventional thinking, but obviously, we don’t have that in our household, and I doubt you do in yours.
So, she graduated school for a year. What did she do? As soon as she graduated, she bought a house with her boyfriend in Tennessee. They did renovations, bought at a good time. She leveraged money out of her infinite banking policy for the down payment. This is a 23-year-old, by the way. They built up about 100k in equity so far. Now, they’re moving to Nashville this week, literally, and they’re going to rent out the other house. They still have these equity gains to churn, and they want to start doing their next deal. It’s just so cool to see that kids can do that. Everything we’re talking about, it’s never too early to start along this path.
There’ll be so many people who say, “I can’t do that, I just won’t know how.” Your daughter had you to give her confidence, but she had to take that step. We can give all the confidence, but she still had to take that step forward. The clearest way to get to where you want to go is to start walking. Going out there and taking action, that’s incredible. It shows that you just need to take action. Were there lessons learned? Was it a perfect renovation? No, nothing is. But she grew stronger and said, “Well, it wasn’t that bad.” Here we are, look what we’ve accomplished. Now, they’re able to capture equity, move out, capitalize on their insurance policy—that’s incredible.
That’s the story of taking action and seeing all the good things that can happen. Most of the time, society is trained to think, “If I buy this house, it will have all these problems, it’ll collapse, there’ll be a fire.” Our mind goes to the worst place. But if the worst place is possible, why can’t the best place be possible? Your daughter’s proof of concept shows that great things can happen. Why should we always expect bad things to happen?
What if everything you thought you knew about investing was wrong?
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So, let’s jump into mindset for a minute, Jason. I know you and I both share ultra-endurance type events, challenging yourself mentally and physically. To this day, I’m still super impressed by the ultra-marathon you did during the lockdown in COVID around your neighborhood. Tell us a little bit about your athletic journey and that event specifically because it was amazing. I watched you on that whole journey.
There are certain things that you just have to do for yourself. Right now, I get up every day and work out, and when I say every day, I mean every day. If I had to leave at 5:00 a.m. tomorrow to go to Atlanta to see some more properties, I’d get up at 2:00 a.m. I just do this every day. It’s what I’ve said I have to do. Don’t feel well? Do it. Ear hurts? Do it. Anything, just get up and do it.
I’ve set this narrative in a lot of ways, and I found that it’s allowed me to stress myself for endurance runs. If you’ve ever run a marathon or thought about it, you can find a marathon training program that builds you up gradually. But if you’re going to run 100 miles, you can’t just run 80 miles two weeks after an event. You don’t know because you haven’t experienced it.
In most of life, we get scared away from the ledge because we’re worried about the ends. I’ve always broken 100 miles into smaller parts. I’ve done five miles before, so let’s get five miles. Let’s get to the aid station, figure it out, and see where we go from there. Those are check marks, and lo and behold, you can be at 100 miles. If I said at the moment, “I’m going to run 100 miles,” my mind would be like, “What? You’ve never done that before.” Our mind wants to protect us, but when you break tasks down, it’s doable.
You can run 100 miles in 25-mile races. The first 50 miles are your legs; the last 50 miles are your mind. As I go through the race, I experience different things. I could feel great one mile and feel like the world is collapsing the next. You go through nights and days, and you use experiences you’ve built up. That’s a lot like life; it’s not going to be perfect. Weather’s pouring out? Run. Snowing? Run. 100 degrees? Run. We can’t let the ultimate narrative dictate our life.
I’ve tried to teach my kids not to say, “Oh, it’s raining.” No, it’s raining; it’s great. Where would the world be without rain? Why not treat every day like it’s 75 and sunny if that’s your perfect environment?
The ultra I did, everything was in lockdown, so they were doing virtual ultras. I did four 25-mile loops. One piece of the puzzle was that I tested it in the car, and it ended up being a little over, about 27 miles. I ran three 27-mile loops. The hardest part was the unpredictability. The last 19 miles were the hardest because the temperature dropped, my body was depleted, and I found myself lost. I had to figure it out. The first three loops were easy because I had a path.
That day, I had five or six people run with me. Someone who had never done longer than a marathon ran 37 miles. Someone who never ran past six miles ran 15 miles. Someone who never ran past 10 miles did a marathon. All these people broke records because we were just out there doing it. It’s us putting the cap on it. I was running with a friend training for a marathon, and he always stopped at a stop sign. I said, “Let’s run 100 feet past the stop sign.” That one day, he did, and the next day he ran four miles, then four and a half, then five. It’s that little part that breaks the rhythm and changes the narrative.
Yeah, no, that’s really inspiring, Jason. I really love it. From a mindset perspective, that quote is so powerful—50% is physical, and the second 50% is all in your mind. I’ve had many events like that as well. Tell us how that mindset has translated for you into raising a family, being a father, and growing a business.
Jason: The path forward is unpredictable. We can do our best to protect it, but our kids will still have days they don’t feel well, they’ll stub their toes, they’ll get cuts. In business, we’ll do our best to have the best days, but there will be things that come up that are difficult. To ride the wave, as they say, is key. Emotional stress is where we all lose because we assume every pinnacle moment is the most important. If I have a healthy family and happy kids, and I can continue to engage and grow them, then I am doing my best.
I’m doing everything I want in life, and that carries through to my life and my business. My ultimate goal is to be my best self. The kids see me interacting with other people. If I was constantly angry, yelling, not using good language, what example am I setting for them? We live in Tennessee, around a couple of our buildings. We take the kids out and show them how the buildings are improving. We teach them that we’re making these better places to live. Although it’s not where we live, there are people, little kids just like them, living in these buildings. Now they can have a nice place to live, play in the playground, go out and do things.
We’re showing them that we’re improving the lives of others. If that message can carry forward to them and from them to others, that will set forth the best life for them.
It gets back to running and working out. You have to do what you say you’re going to do. It’s easy to let yourself off the hook—you want to eat ice cream tonight, go eat ice cream; you want to watch Netflix and not do what you’re supposed to do, no problem. But it’s holding ourselves accountable that makes all the difference. It’s funny because it’s easy to hold everybody else accountable, even when we’re not holding ourselves accountable. If I’m going to show up and do as I say, it makes me a better person. Think about you and your investors—if you show up, tell them what you’re going to do, and then do it, it carries through everything else you do in your life. It carries through how you act in your family. That sets the narrative for people to want to be around that type of person. If they ask me a question, we get back to them. If they have questions about the investment, we keep communication levels completely open with monthly updates. It’s predictable, and that’s what we do.
Yeah, in the Marine Corps, they call that leadership by example. There needs to be more of that in corporate America and elsewhere. Why 4:32 and not 4:30? Why that specific number?
You know, 4-3-2-1, go! When you do that, it makes everything easy. It could be 4:25 today or 4:30, but 4-3-2-1, go! Once you’re up, you’re up. It’s the point of not hitting snooze for five more minutes, seven more minutes. Boom, 4-3-2-1, get out of bed, and you’re not going back.
Yeah, I’ve been getting up early my entire life. Now, I really cherish the time because it’s the only time I work out every day, and it’s the only time people aren’t looking for you. It’s about creating space for yourself to have that thinking time. When you’re working out, it’s amazing the thoughts you can have. The endorphins are pumping, and you’re thinking about new goals and all the things you want to do. Then I spend some time journaling that, and it becomes crystal clear on living that intentional life and really moving the ball forward where you want to go.
You have to protect your thoughts. If every day you wake up and can’t get past your own self, it doesn’t matter what’s awarded or afforded or what’s in front of you. If you’re not prepared, waking up late, rushing, eating something bad, being in traffic—everything feels chaotic from the start, and your life ultimately feels more chaotic. Taking a moment to set yourself in the right way carries over to your business, family, fitness, everything.
Yeah, 100%. So, tell us about your business right now. How are things progressing? The market’s obviously shifting a lot right now. You’re focused in Tennessee, I believe, so tell us a little bit about that market. We haven’t done any projects in that market. Give us your thoughts.
We’re really excited about the Nashville MSA. I stay positioned in this area, not going over to Memphis, Knoxville, or Clarksville. I really like this MSA because there’s a ton of growth happening, job dynamics are building, massive supply constraints, and continued demand. There’s a need for multi-family housing, and there’s no easy way forward to meet it. We have a great team, a great management company, and our assets continue to perform well because we provide great properties and great service. We’re really bullish on this area.
We have some development projects coming up to meet the need. In the town we live, there’s a moratorium on multi-family being built if it’s not zoned correctly. They’ve downsized the RM character, which dictates how many units you can get per acre, due to the sewer system being unable to keep up. Even with that, all my properties are 100% occupied, and we’re pushing the narrow on rents. There’s no housing, and you can’t really build it, showing that controlling your debt to match these properties is crucial. This market is one we want to grow within.
Yeah, for sure. How about the debt markets right now? Has that been impacting any deals in the pipeline?
Uh, we’ve had one that’s been impacted, and it was more just an over-promise, under-deliver from the banker side. But we’ve gotten past that. You have to look at the options here—what’s your business plan and how does that equate to the debt? There are a lot of banks who are still aggressive out there and can be very good lenders. Of course, their rates are changing too, and terms are changing. You see different terms, you know, five years kind of pushing it, and some different amortizations. It’s also making agency loans like Fannie and Freddie more attractive. Some of the properties were coming into those loans. There are options out there playing within our wheelhouse of what’s available to us.
Yeah, for sure. Jason, if you could give just one piece of advice to our listeners about accelerating their own wealth trajectories, what would it be?
You don’t have to have a lot. I mean, you could start today and just do something, right? You can listen—I’m sure you’ve listened to Dave a ton on the podcast—take one thing he’s doing, learn from it, and try the strategy. Start implementing it, even if it’s on a small scale, because that builds into bigger and bigger pieces. Whether it’s infinite banking or syndications or any other narrative, you don’t have to do everything. You have to do one thing well, and that one thing will grow. With what we see out there today, it feels like we have to do all these things at once, but no, you can do one thing well. Look at so many people who have been massively successful—they started in one spot. If you’re looking to build yourself and build your wealth, find that one piece to get you started and then take action.
Yeah, awesome, Jason. I really enjoyed it. I appreciate you coming on the show today. Very grateful for that. How can folks find you, follow you, and connect with you? We’ll definitely put some notes in the show notes, but where’s the best place to connect?
Yeah, Dave, I can’t believe it’s been a couple of years. Thank you so much for having me on and introducing me to your audience. So, Jason Yarusi at yarusiholdings.com, Y-A-R-U-S-I holdings dot com. Find everything about us, Multi-Family Live, our podcast, our Seven-Figure Multi-Family Mastermind, and also what we’re working on from the multi-family side of investing.
Awesome. Thanks again, Jason. Really appreciate it.
I appreciate it.