Episode Details

When you're on right, you want to stay locked in. It's a focus game. You need to be thinking, not grabbing. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian Osgood, your host, and welcome to another episode. I actually have a friend here today. I'm very excited to have him on, Mr. Matt Barge. This guy is actually a hospitality guy. Why is he on Multifamily Strategy? Well, you're about to find out.

Matt, welcome to the show, man. Great to be here, Christian. Conversation uh yeah excited to do this podcast with you i am very happy to have you here uh matt's matt's a very interesting guy when i first met him he was actually reaching out with questions on uh what our course mentorship program looks like a multi-family strategy as i got to know him in that process um he's like well you know i was like where do you live he's like oh i'm kind of a nomad i live i live wherever um you know sometimes california sometimes texas i do projects in both I'm like, okay, what is your goal? And he's like, well, buying hospitality. I'm like, interesting. Reaching out about multifamily, a multifamily mentorship, talking about hospitality. Already interested. So the entrepreneurial nomad, hospitality, boutique hotel master, Matt is here with us.

Matt, I always like to, we'll talk about where you're at. I gave a little hint to it. You do boutique hotels. We'll talk about them. I like to know everyone's starting point. Before you were in business, before you were an entrepreneur, before any of it, tell us a little bit about Matt's origin story. For sure. So I think I'm going to be described as a monopoly kid. So I'm really good at math, love math. And that was my favorite game, you know, growing up and grew up in Southern California, went to school up north and ended up coming out to Texas 10 years ago. I got offered a job out here and stayed. I like it here. So I actually used to be a software developer. So I wrote iPhone code for MoneyGram. And so I was a pretty typical W-2 earner. I played tennis, enjoyed a bit of traveling and things like that. Everything sort of changed when I bought my first house. And I bought my first house in the colony, which is actually near there. You're going to be right next door.

At the time, that was seven years ago. So there was very little development. moment actually i remember riding my bike i drove up with my bike and i rode around where they were going to build the new toyota headquarters and we're gonna there i had heard they were going to build the liberty mutual headquarters and whatnot i was kind of riding my bike around getting the lay of the land and i had you know so i bought there and a tennis buddy came over and it was just me living in that house and he said hey you should put them in these spare bedrooms up on Airbnb. And I thought about it. I was like, ah, I don't know. I decided to try it out and it just took off. And before I knew it, I found myself, you know, opening another bedroom, another bedroom, another house, another house, another house, another house. I scaled it slowly. So I, I bought as a primary residence once per year, but, and I found that I really enjoyed the business. So that was starting small from a single bedroom. I learned how to market that bedroom. So, you know, good photo, good, clean, you know, clean appearance, you know, nice photos. I was doing them initially with my iPhone, but then hired a photographer quickly to, you know, get nice photos done. I was picking out pillows at HomeGoods and just found that I really enjoyed kind of the design aspects. I had a little Roomba who would help me clean the bedroom, room. Take me five minutes now to knock it out.

Yeah. And so really started at the nuclear level. And then just grew it piece by piece. I used my software developer background to slowly but surely build a lot of infrastructure to run that small portfolio. So that's kind of my origin story. I used to be a