Instead of letting it sit in the bank, Deepa Akula put her hard-earned money to work through real estate. Now, she is the founder of Vinside Capital and is a GP for over 1000 apartment units and an LP for over 1300 units. She is grateful for the opportunity to be a full-time real investor, which gives her the freedom to travel the world and spend time with family. Today, Deepa joins us to talk about her investing journey, how she created passive cash flow to cover their daily expenses, and how she is using her engineering background to her advantage.
[00:01 - 11:06] From Engineer to Investor
- Get to know Deepa
- She talks about the nitty-gritty of being an engineer
- Earning good money in her job and started to look for investments
- Being laid off gave her the chance to do real estate full time
- She learned about real estate by reading books and joining a bootcamp
- As an engineer, numbers are her thing and she’s able to do well in underwriting
- Do not trust proformas, know your numbers
[11:07 - 17:48] Building Meaningful Passive Income
- Stop hoarding cash and start investing
- How she transitioned from LP to GP
- Being a detail-oriented person has helped establish her credibility
- Deepa’s goal in the future: doings deals at her own pace
[17:49 - 19:47] Closing Segment
- Reach out to Deepa!
- Links Below
- Final Words
Tweetable Quotes
“ If you underwrite in a vacuum, you really don't know if it's good or bad… if you’re just working and not having anybody check it, it's a big no-no.” - Deepa Akula
“The number one thing is not to trust proformas when you receive them.” - Deepa Akula
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Connect with Deepa on the Vinside Capital website and follow her LinkedIn.
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:00] Deepa Akula: I had learned about inflation, just very reading books. And I thought, you know, it's not a good thing that we are hoarding cash, but we did not know. We didn't want to hurry and invest in something that we didn't understand either. So in, in the time when I was doing the research and trying to get a proof of concept by investing as a limited partner, we had built up some savings. And once it looked like it was going to work, we kind of invested fast.
[00:00:39] Sam Wilson: Deepa Akula is an LP and GP in over a thousand apartment units in Texas, Florida, and Arizona. She's also a former head of engineering turned full-time real estate investor. Deepa, welcome to the show.
[00:00:50] Deepa Akula: Thank you. I'm so honored to be here, Sam.
[00:00:52] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. Hey, the pleasure is mine, especially. I don't normally get guests calling from, I guess, you're halfway around the world. Where are you right now?
[00:01:02] Deepa Akula: I'm in India right now, visiting my parents in Hyderabad.
[00:01:05] Sam Wilson: That's awesome. Very, very cool. It's 9: 30 here in Memphis, Tennessee. So that puts you at roughly 8:30 there?
[00:01:12] Deepa Akula: It's 8:06, yeah. It's 8:06 PM.
[00:01:15] Sam Wilson: Well, soon enough, soon enough you can tell me what tomorrow is like. That'll be absolutely great. I'm looking forward to jumping in here today. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes to the show: in 90 seconds or less, can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?
[00:01:27] Sam Wilson: Yeah, sure.
[00:01:28] Deepa Akula: So I started as an LP. I'm a mechanical aerospace engineer by training. And I was looking to place my capital and started as an LP. And now I still do engineering on the side, but I'm a GP and an LP. And once I invested, I had proof of concept, and once the worth proof of concept, we started investing more and more. And now we have enough passive income to just cover our daily bills. So we are financially free and it gives me the freedom to travel the world and spend some time with family. And also look for deals at the same time. I'm working. This is not a vacation, but freedom of place too. So, yeah.
[00:02:08] Sam Wilson: That is fantastic. I wonder there's so many things there I wanted to dig into. What is a space engineer?
[00:02:17] Deepa Akula: It's mechanical and aerospace engineering. So Boeing paid for my masters and I worked on the materials for the outside, for the skin of the aircraft on friction stir building. So, yeah, Boeing was looking into using different alloys, different element alloys and it was research. So I was one of the research assistants and that's what I did. I'm a mechanical engineer, got a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, master's in mechanical engineer, space engineering.
[00:02:46] Sam Wilson: That's awesome. I love it. Even those words, I probably couldn't even spell those words. So, you know, I look at people like you and I'm like, oh my gosh, she is way smarter than I am.
[00:02:55] Deepa Akula: Oh, you're too kind.
[00:02:57] Sam Wilson: No, no, that's really, really cool. I absolutely love it. I love to fly. I'm a pilot as well. And so I'm grateful for all the work for that you guys do. And I oftentimes look at it and I'm like, I have no idea how this thing works.
[00:03:08] Deepa Akula: A lot of work goes into it. Every life's important. So a lot of work goes into it.
[00:03:13] Sam Wilson: A lot of work goes into it, so I'm grateful. Thank you. I think that's absolutely cool. What was your tipping point? What was the thing when you're like, okay, hey, cool. I am a mechanical engineer. I'm an aerospace engineer. I got to do something else. Was there a light bulb moment? Tell me about that.
[00:03:29] Deepa Akula: Yeah, so it was pretty gradual. And me and my husband, we moved to Seattle and were making good money. And so I was starting to think about investments. So I just had to place our capital somewhere and I was looking into different investment vehicles and I'm an avid reader. So I stumbled onto syndications. And I did not know anybody that was doing syndications at that time. And looked into it and through a random connection, found a general partner and invested in her deal. And once I started to see the distributions come in quarterly distributions, then I had proof of concept that, oh, well so this is real. And it can work. And we started to invest more and more, and it was pretty gradual. And the light bulb moment was really, there was not one, but I got laid off during the pandemic. And I was like, okay, this is my chance to not have a W2 and work for myself. And that's when, I was a GP already, but I chose not to get another job in engineering and do real estate full-time.
[00:04:35] Sam Wilson: Wow. That's a big, big jump. I mean, tell me, I guess, so you said, Hey, you, you figured out, you know, okay, I became a GP. What was the timeline between when you first heard about syndications until you put, or excuse me, an LP until you put your first money in a deal?
[00:04:48] Deepa Akula: Oh, when I first put up a single penny, it was about three years. I had analysis paralysis big time. So I actually knew how, how to underwrite a deal before I invested as an LP. So that's the kind of work I did just because I did not know anybody that was doing it at that time, and I did not want to lose $50,000 just by investing because I read in some book. So I took a three-day course, a bootcamp through RE Mentor. And it was just a three-day bootcamp and that was all the education I got in person, but everything else was just reading books. I might have read hundreds of books in those three years and had enough confidence to put my first $50,000 in 2019.
[00:05:35] Sam Wilson: That's wild. So you felt like you had a full understanding of how to underwrite a deal before you ever put your money and how did you practice that?
[00:05:44] Deepa Akula: So just on random deals on CoStar. Just random deals. So, yeah, and I had a loose mentor who was just looking at those numbers because, you know, if you underwrite in a vacuum, you really don't know if it's good or bad, you know. If you really don't know how to estimate taxes or when the taxes are assessed and different states do it differently, so if you're in a vacuum and just working and not having anybody check it, it's a big no-no. So I had a gentleman that was kind enough to kind of guide me and he's a loose mentor. If you'd ask him, Hey, were you Deepa's mentor? He's like, no,. But I really did not pay for mentorship. I loosely have ties with people that I kind of come in contact with and just ping them and learn. And I used to underwrite single-family homes too. That's kind of how I got interested. I really dislike shopping, like any kind of shopping, but real estate. I'm all about it. So, I'm not in shopping about clothes or anything else, but real estate, I would just underwrite the deal of their deal. So that's kind of how I was like, you know, I should really do what I like. to decompress for a living, then I would really not feel like I'm working. And even without knowing, even when I was in school, I would just randomly look at single-family house in the areas. And I was like, oh, it's pretty simple, the math is. So yeah, that's kind of how I started and learned. And there's a little bit more to multifamily. And, you know, just there's so much resources out there. I would just attend multiple webinars to learn and practice.
[00:07:25] Sam Wilson: When you say so many resources out there, I mean, either you're an Excel guru, which wouldn't surprise me, or you borrowed somebody else's model out of the gate because there are a lot of nuances to it. How did you build your first or what did you use as a resource for your first underwriting model?
[00:07:42] Deepa Akula: So the very first one was Michael Lang's model. And I had bought it for fun years ago and I was modeling it. And, you know, I am pretty good at Excel because I was, when I was head of engineering, I was building these templates for my engineers to work in. So they're kind of like sandboxes and to make it foolproof because if something goes wrong, these structures are out there. We are driving under it, their houses under it, so, let me take a step back. I was designing overhead structures there, maybe about 10,000 structures that me or my team designed are in service right now in the US and Canada. So I was designing the spreadsheets in which my engineers would design the structures. So I love tinkering with Excel and I saw Michael's model and then made some additions to it to just make it my own.
[00:08:38] Sam Wilson: You made some additions, you mean you poured gasoline on a fire. It was like, oh, okay. Yeah, this is okay. But I'm an aerospace engineer and I can do a lot better than this. So, you know, if I can push, I'd love to see your model but I'm sure it would make all the rest of us jealous. That's really, really cool. And you said something here that I don't think I've ever heard on this show, which is you said that I did it for fun. Like, underwriting is work for most of us, you realize that, right?
[00:09:06] Deepa Akula: I understand. I understand. But, you know, as engineers numbers is our thing and, you know, you feel like you have more control. You change one number and you have control to like change all the numbers on the sheet. So just playing with different numbers is more fun. And more than that, I used to code in VBA. So coding in VBA was more fun. So I would just code and create buttons and everything and try to make it more fun and easy and I'm trying to hide the code behind it and make it easy. So building it was more fun. And the more formulas I write and debugging is a lot more fun to me. So that's what I, all my formula would, like, have to wrap and then debugging would be like, oh, where, where did it go wrong? Why is it not working? So, yeah. That’s what I did to de-stress.
[00:09:54] Sam Wilson: That's amazing. Wow. Some of us go to the gym. Some of us do yoga. Some of us have bad habits. You, on the other hand, underwrite multifamily deals. That's a unique skillset. What would you say is the number one thing that you learned when doing that?
[00:10:10] Deepa Akula: Number one thing while creating the model or underwriting?
[00:10:13] Sam Wilson: Underwriting.
[00:10:14] Deepa Akula: Underwriting, the number one thing is not to trust proformas when you receive them. The seller might have expenses that they're putting on a corporate level that we are not seeing on the property level. So just knowing the numbers and at least having an idea of what it's going to cost per door. And that just comes from practice. You know, it's catch-22, you just do it, learn it and then keep doing it and get to learn more.
[00:10:42] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. Yeah, at times I wonder why commercial brokers, which, I mean, I have my real estate license. Do I do commercial brokerage? Not necessarily, but why do they even put the proformas out there? Because most of us are just like, I'm not even like paying.
[00:10:58] Deepa Akula: Yeah. We just have to underwrite from scratch.
[00:11:00] Sam Wilson: It really is true. So yeah. That's really, really interesting. Yeah. I like that. Don't trust the proforma. Let's talk a little bit about passive income to cover your bills. I thought that was an interesting statement you had made, it takes a lot of investments. This is my thesis. It takes a lot of investments to create any sort of meaningful, passive income. I think passive income is great, but even if let's suggest, say that we're, you know, we put 50 grand in a deal and it's whatever, a eight cap, I don't know. I'm making up numbers here, but let's say it throws off, you know, 700 bucks every quarter. I mean, that doesn't really put a dent in the income to cover bills category. Now, how did you do that? Like what did it take to get that income stream built up? You know, we've all hit the equity multiple. I believe most of us have hit an equity multiple in a deal we've passively invested at some point, and those are great pay days. But not until the exit do we normally catch enough money to go, okay, this is meaningful.
[00:11:55] Deepa Akula: Right. Right. So me as head of engineering, I'm a licensed professional civil structural engineer. I'm a self-taught civil structural engineer. And as head of engineering, I was making meaningful money. And my husband is in information technology. He's in, it works for wild Disney and pretty simple, like I said, I do not enjoy shopping. So we had good, good savings. And we were hoarding cash. Like I said, as we were starting to earn money through our W2s, it was just sitting in the bank and we didn't spend it anywhere. We're just trying to look for a meaningful vehicle for us to invest in. And by the time I did all my research and started to invest. It was about three years of research went from 2016 to 2019. There was a lot of research and studying and talking to people. And that's when we started investing as an LP. But once we saw the distributions coming in, we kind of really escalated and put in big amounts, big chunks enough to cover our, like, and I'm not even counting the exits. This is just quarterly distributions that I'm talking about. It's enough to cover our expenses.
[00:13:05] Sam Wilson: That's really cool. I love I love that and yeah, it does take some capital upfront, I think, in order to attract that initial, you know, nut where you're like, oh, okay, , this is now doing something that that I appreciate.
[00:13:17] Deepa Akula: Right. And it was out of necessity. I had learned about inflation, just by reading books. And I thought, you know, it's not a good thing that we are hoarding cash, but we did not know. We didn't want to hurry and invest in something that we didn't understand either. So in the time when I was doing the research and trying to get a proof of concept by investing as a limited partner, we had built up some savings, and once it looked like it was going to work, we kind of invested fast.
[00:13:46] Sam Wilson: That's awesome.
[00:13:47] Deepa Akula: With multiple deals.
[00:13:48] Sam Wilson: You've moved into the code GP space. What's that transition been like and how did that happen?
[00:13:54] Deepa Akula: Right. Yeah, no, no. I love it. Thank you for the question. So I was an LP in a couple of deals before I got a call to be a co-GP. And as an LP, I would read the PPM the whole way. Some of them were 80 pages, the other one was 200 pages. And I would read the whole thing a few times and catch some mistakes in it and call the GP and say, Hey, you need to get a better lawyer or the legal person need to like, they're calling a something, two different things in two different places. And I was like, is it the same thing? And they were like, you read the whole thing? I'm like, yeah. And that you know, inadvertently, it told them that I'm a details person. And I would just ask a lot of questions and just from my questions and the fact that they knew I was catching their lawyer's mistakes in the PPM, they were like, okay, so she knows. And when the time came for them, just me and my husband both are engineers. And most of her friends were like, Hey, how are you guys getting this distributions? And we were doing 506B deal. and I wanted to introduce my friends to the GPS, but they couldn't really take their investments because they did not know them. So they were like, okay, Deepa, do you want to raise capital and be on this deal? I was like, really well, I was like when, and they go right now. So it was just out of the blue call saying, Hey, we have a deal on the contract. And I trust this person. I had invested my money with them. So I didn't really have to do any due diligence on the person, on the group. I did some due diligence on the project itself and it looked pretty good. And that's how I got my foot in the door for a co-GP position.
[00:15:41] Sam Wilson: That is really cool. I love the fact that you said you read the documents, you know, end to end. I know in my first limited partner's deals, I did the same thing. If it was a repeat investment with the same sponsor, maybe I wasn't as meticulous, but certainly, read line for line. And it's a laborious process. I think it took me like four hours to get through the 200 pages, 'cause you're just like, I need this to be on like napkin sized, this just need, this is what you're going to do, this is what I'm going to do. And this is how we wrap this up. Okay, except 200 pages later because that's the world we live in. And so yeah, it kind of shocked the sponsor as well. They're like, wow. Like, this is a really detailed question. I have a public confession here to make in that I just recently didn't read through the entire stack of my deal deck or of my documents. And it was probably the most embarrassing thing as a general partner I've ever done in that I got the documents back. I read through them high level. It was a new attorney group for us. And I said, man, everything seems to be in order. And I was the receiving call of the investor like you going, Hey, there's some conflicting pieces of information here. I turned inward like, oh no, like I'm hot now, just like my body temperature goes up thinking about it. I'm like I have done this so many times and I have never had that call from an investor. I wanted to crawl on a hole.
[00:17:02] Sam Wilson: So note to self: one, read all the documents if you're an LP, and two, read all the documents if you're a GP. That's the rule I think that Deepa is teaching us here and that's yeah, that's just a, you know, that's a hard lesson learned both ways. So, you know, thank you certainly for sharing that, what does the future look like for you?
[00:17:19] Deepa Akula: Thank you for that question because I am actively trying to not build myself another high-stress job. So, it's tough. It's tough to not work as much now that this is my first summer without a job. I am trying to say no to more deals than I say yes to. And I'd like to do at least one deal every quarter, and that would be a good pace for me. And want to do that for the foreseeable future.
[00:17:48] Sam Wilson: That's awesome. Very, very cool. Deepa. I loved your journey here in real estate. I loved how you started off just learning for three years. I think one of the fun facts you gave me was that you read a book. What was it? The barking up the wrong tree or barking up the right tree. I can't remember. You said you read it five times.
[00:18:05] Deepa Akula: Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker.
[00:18:08] Sam Wilson: Yeah, you said you read that over and over and over until you finally graphed it in detail. As an engineer, I'm not shocked, knowing that you're an engineer, I'm not shocked that your attention to detail is the way it is, but the really cool story on how you've transitioned from an aerospace engineer into now full-time real estate, clearly taking a measured approach to life and getting what you want out of it, which is why you're out of the country doing this podcast at, you know, late in the evening now the other side of the world with me. So certainly appreciate that. And love your story of coming in as an LP first and doing a lot of deals as an LP, and then joined the general partnership side. So very, very cool. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
[00:18:49] Deepa Akula: LinkedIn would be the best place to reach out to me. My LinkedIn profile has my full name, so it's Deepa Reddy Akula. And another place is vinsidecapital.com is my website. So those are the two places to get a hold of me.
[00:19:05] Sam Wilson: And what, what's the name of the website again?
[00:19:08] Deepa Akula: Vinside, V I N S I D E, vinsidecapital.com.
[00:19:13] Sam Wilson: Got it. We'll absolutely make sure we put that all in the show notes. Deepa, thank you so much for coming on today. I certainly appreciate it.
[00:19:19] Deepa Akula: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. Thanks, Sam.
