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Meet Christopher Levarek of Valkere Investment Group in North Phoenix

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Levarek.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Christopher. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
In early 2018, while working a highly lucrative W-2 job I saw a very big dip in my 401k and began to pay attention to my finances as well as my overall retirement goals and financial future. As CEOs and companies affected stock prices by poor decision making or actions alone, think Elon Musk on the Joe Rogan show, I began to look into alternative ideas to create alternative investment strategies and passive income streams for financial freedom.

In speaking with my brother Ashton Levarek, we realized we had similar concerns with the market and wanted to have access to more life choices and opportunities for ourselves and our family. We began educating in investing in real estate through podcasts, books, webinars, online forums, local in-person real estate meetups and remote conferences.

After months of determining our strategy and educating on the subject, we invested in two duplexes in Durham in North Carolina. Since we were not local to the market and to fully implement our investment strategy, we partnered with and grew a team of experts to include property managers, contractors, lenders and attorneys to name a few. As we learned and grew, we developed a company called “Valkere Investment Group” and our brand as multifamily investors and operators began to grow. Our wives, Vivian(Ashton’s) and Jamie(mine) joined the team late 2018 filling needed roles in the operations and financial management space bringing much-needed detail and organization.

Our strategies and company grew into the real estate syndication model as we began partnering with other interested investors to syndicate or acquire large multifamily or apartment complexes in a partnership. Fast forward to today, we’ve closed now 42 units or doors in North Carolina with over 2.75 million in asset value and raised in partner investor capital around 1.25 million.

As veterans ourselves, we partner and align with other veterans/military/W-2 job earners seeking financial freedom, passive income or better than traditional financial options. Our goal is to create opportunities in the real estate space through multifamily investments, help educate others on the investment journey and partner to achieve massive success further enabling us all to live a life of our choice.

Has it been a smooth road?
Failure is just a stepping stone to success. In real estate investing, you are guaranteed to have failures and this why most people desiring to be real estate investors never get started.

Before we were even out the door on our first purchase, we had multiple challenges with the property. Firstly, not understanding renovation or construction clearly, we purchased two duplexes at 209,000 and overshot our renovations budget by $50,000. We scraped every nearby resource for additional funds and nervously awaiting the next contractor or property manager called to say more was needed. As items to renovate continued to surface, we questioned what kind of investment we had actually invested in. Our questions continued to rise as the contractors discovered a shotgun recently hidden under the house while renovations were in progress.

When the renovations completed and we leased the units, our fourth tenant was shot and killed in a nearby city. As you can imagine this was an unfortunate event and we again questioned what we were doing investing in real estate. These properties once cleaned up and leased out fully performed very well but the initial lessons on this first property were eye-opening.

Since that first property, we continue to face issues daily but truly it is shifting the mindset from a “I can’t” mentality to a “how can I”. No challenge is insurmountable and there is always some way to turn the experience into a positive outcome.

Some additional challenges we’ve faced on the varying properties to include:

 1) $5000 in earnest money disappearing after close
 2) Investors backing out at the last minute of closing putting the property close deadline in jeopardy.
 3) A tree falling down on tenants cars
 4) 3 A/C units on a renovating five unit property being completed stripped and stolen for parts.
 5) Dealing with evictions and tenants living in roach-infested quarters.
 6) Closing attorney or title agency backing out of handling the closing at the last minute.

7) Attending Daily/Weekly company meetings throughout the week with varying schedules due to EST/MST/PST timezone differences from nights on a Sunday to after work on weekdays.
8) Time commitments working a W-2 job full time, raising kids ages 0-5 and growing a high performing real estate investment firm.
9) Holding family accountable to a deliverable for the company and doing so in a cordial manner.
10) Prioritizing the “one thing” that would be best in the moment to achieve our goals
11) Raising $400,000 in under 14 days after investors previously committed canceled commitments.
12) Company partnerships not developing correctly and partner not adding value.

The list goes on… however it truly is a highly rewarding journey for us and our partners.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Valkere Investment Group story. Tell us more about the business.
Valkere Investment Group specializes in syndicating or acquiring multifamily real estate providing passive investors recession-resistant, better than stock market returns, tax beneficial and time-proven lucrative investment vehicle. We target value-add B/C class apartment complexes in markets with positive economic indicators to execute our business model of renovating, increasing property value and providing quality affordable housing.

We are known for an honest, open and committed approach to delivering an excellent investment with our investors and partners while educating and elevating those who are seeking similar goals of financial freedom, more choices and more opportunity.

I am most proud of our dedication as a team and family to success and commitment to our goals despite all challenges and competing priorities. We are continuously breaking down commonly perceived social norms or limits on the status and financial barriers, even those we have put up ourselves. This mindset shift and transition to understanding our true potential as a team, while sharing our journey and knowledge with those around us, is more rewarding than any other aspect.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Great question! With real estate as many are aware, we are at or near the peak of a normal real estate market cycle. Like other cycles in economics, real estate ebbs and flows with an expansion, peak, recession and recovery stage. The next stage in the cycle will be a recession of some kind. Although it is difficult to predict when this will occur, we do believe it will be within the next 1-2 years and will again reset the clock on real estate values, not to mention how it will be acquired and sold.

With this being said, multifamily properties have proven to be very recession-resistant if purchased and managed correctly. People will always need a good place to live in a strong market with a diverse array of strong economic drivers such as positive population and employment growth.

Additionally, the ever-increasing shortage in affordable housing across the nation coupled with a lack of interest for millennials in owning a home, the retiring baby boomer population and the high immigration influx in the United States, multi-family properties will continue to have a favorable or strong position despite a recession.

Short-term rentals and the Airbnb model are presenting strong cases for investment while shared living facilities are becoming the new growing trend as we see this shift from living in a single-family home to living in these types of rentals. More and more renters are choosing living spaces centered around social interaction, aptly nicknamed or coined “Co-Living” or “Intentional Communities”. See our blog article talking over some of these types of living arrangements taking over cities such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago, https://www.valkeregroup.com/blog/co-living.

As we see this continued growth in the varying forms of the multifamily real estate space, we are constantly seeking out ways to expand, scale as well adjust our model as needed with the market cycle.

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