In this episode of Sixty Plus Uncensored, host Seb Frey talks with Jullion Cooper, the founder and CEO of Properties by JMC, a company that buys apartment complexes and brings investors along for the ride. What makes Jullion’s story unusual is where he does it from. He owns six properties and has seen only one of them in person, and he currently runs his real estate business from Liberia, in West Africa, where he works in international affairs. His 23-unit apartment building in Lansing, Michigan was purchased while he was living thousands of miles away. Over the course of the conversation, Jullion walks through how apartment investing actually works, from due diligence and the numbers lenders care about to finding investors, managing a building remotely, and what it means for someone who wants to invest in real estate without ever becoming a landlord. For listeners who have spent decades building savings and are now wondering how to make that money work harder in retirement, it’s a practical, unvarnished look at a type of investment most people have only heard about.
Proximity Doesn’t Eliminate Risk. Education Does.
Jullion is quick to clarify that he isn’t recommending anyone buy property sight unseen. His point is a different one: being close to a building doesn’t make an investment safe. In his words, proximity doesn’t eliminate risk, education does. The real danger in real estate, as he sees it, is ignorance. Remote investing, he explains, doesn’t mean running a business from a laptop and hoping for the best. It means having reliable people on the ground, knowing exactly what makes a good deal, and having systems in place to verify every piece of information before money changes hands.
That foundation didn’t come quickly. Jullion explains that his first apartment deal was actually his fiftieth. He analyzed, or “underwrote,” 49 properties before he found one that met his standards. That repetition, he says, taught him what to look for and gave him the confidence to move fast when the right building finally came along.
The Secret Formula Is Due Diligence
When Seb asks about the formula Jullion uses to pick buildings, his answer is simple: due diligence. And he has learned its value the hard way. On one of his earlier single-family properties, he skipped an inspection to save about a thousand dollars. A few years later, water began coming into the basement, and waterproofing it cost him tens of thousands. It’s a mistake he says he would never repeat.
Due diligence also paid off in a big way on his apartment building. The sellers described it as “stabilized,” meaning essentially turnkey, with rents below market and expenses under control. But once Jullion dug into the financial records and sent inspectors to look at the roof, plumbing, and electrical systems, the story didn’t hold up. After already spending thousands on legal fees and inspections, he went back to the brokers with what he had found. If the price couldn’t come down, he told them, he would walk away. The sellers had been asking about $1.25 million. Jullion negotiated roughly $100,000 off and bought the 23-unit building for about $1.15 million. As he puts it, the seller’s job is to tell you a story, and your job during due diligence is to figure out whether that story is fiction.
Stabilized vs. Value-Add: Why Jullion Prefers Upside
Jullion explains two terms that come up constantly in apartment investing. A stabilized building is mostly full, collects market rents, and needs little work. A value-add building has room for improvement, whether that means raising below-market rents, cutting expenses, improving operations, or making upgrades that tenants will pay for. Jullion prefers value-add properties, but only the right kind. Because he invests from overseas, he avoids heavy construction projects that require someone on site to keep costs under control. His building was already mostly renovated inside, so his improvements focus on smaller, high-impact changes.
He gives two concrete examples. The units didn’t have washers and dryers, so he negotiated a deal to lease them as an amenity for tenants. He also fixed a parking lot full of potholes to improve the look of the property. Throughout, he repeats a phrase that captures his approach to every expense: every dollar has a job. An apartment building, he reminds listeners, is a business, not a home, so improvements need to pay for themselves rather than simply look nice.
The Numbers That Matter
Seb, who works in residential real estate in California, presses Jullion on the formulas investors use to value apartment buildings. Jullion is refreshingly honest that he isn’t an expert on every term, and that the same number can mean very different things in different markets. But he walks through the key metrics he relies on.
The cap rate, or capitalization rate, connects a building’s price to its net operating income. Divide the income by the cap rate and you get a rough value. In the Midwest, where Jullion invests, he considers a cap rate of about 9 to 10 percent to be good, while Seb notes that in California, 6 percent would be considered high. A higher cap rate usually means more potential return, but also more risk. Jullion also stresses that the cap rate when you sell matters as much as the one when you buy, and that overly optimistic assumptions about the future can turn a good-looking deal into a disappointing one.
Beyond cap rate, Jullion looks at the internal rate of return (IRR), which measures how quickly investors get their money back with a return over the life of the investment. He targets at least 16 percent. He also looks at the equity multiple, or how many dollars investors get back for each dollar invested, and the cash-on-cash return, the annual cash payments compared with the money invested, which he projects at about 6 percent a year for his current building. His reasoning is straightforward: if an apartment deal can’t beat the roughly 8 to 9 percent long-term average return of the stock market, there’s little reason for investors to take on the extra risk.
Finally, there’s the debt service coverage ratio, the number banks care about most. Lenders generally want a building to bring in at least $1.25 for every $1.00 of mortgage payments before they will make a commercial loan. If a property falls below that threshold, financing usually isn’t available.
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How a Million-Dollar Building Gets Funded
One of the most eye-opening parts of the conversation is how Jullion bought a building worth more than a million dollars without having a million dollars in the bank. Using round numbers, he explains that a bank lent about 70 percent of the purchase price. That left roughly $300,000, plus closing costs and fees, to be raised from investors. Jullion also put in about 10 percent of the capital himself, which he says helped build trust because investors could see he had his own money on the line.
His current deal has about ten investors, with a minimum investment of $25,000. Each building is held in its own limited liability company (LLC), and each investor owns a share of that company. Jullion earns an acquisition fee for putting the deal together, and as the general partner he receives a share of profits, but only after investors have been paid first. He paid a legal team to draft the operating agreement rather than using an online template, warning that “everything is fine until it’s not” and that raising money from other people comes with strict securities rules.
For his first deal, Jullion raised money from friends, family, and professional contacts, under what he describes as a 506(b) offering, which generally requires a pre-existing relationship with investors. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission explains how these Rule 506(b) private offerings work, including limits on advertising and on who can invest. Jullion admits that his first raise was stressful. He went under contract and then had just 60 days to raise several hundred thousand dollars or risk losing his deposit. Next time, he plans to line up interested investors before making an offer.
Jullion also shares how he changed the way he talks about the opportunity. Rather than asking people to help him, he presents it as a chance to own part of a professionally managed apartment building, backed by legal, accounting, and property management teams. Most of his current investors, he notes, have never owned property before. With home prices out of reach for many people, he sees passive apartment investing as a way for more people to participate in real estate.
Finding Deals and Vetting Tenants
When it comes to finding buildings, Jullion uses commercial listing sites such as Crexi and LoopNet, but he says the real value is in the relationships they help him build. By showing brokers he’s serious and knows what he wants, he gets access to off-market deals before other buyers hear about them. Off-market deals can offer better negotiating power, he explains, but often come with messier paperwork, especially from smaller “mom and pop” owners who don’t keep detailed financial records.
He also points out one of the biggest differences between houses and apartment buildings. In single-family real estate, emotions often drive the price. In multifamily, the price comes down to income, verified expenses, and the cap rate. There’s no room for “my grandmother got married here” pricing.
On tenant quality, Jullion recommends checking every lease against the names of the people actually living in the units, reviewing the rent roll for late payment history, looking at how much of the building’s income comes from late fees, and checking maintenance logs for problems like pests. After he took over, his property manager moved the rent due date to the first of the month, made rent late on the fifth, and acted quickly on an eviction when needed. Word spread, and collections improved fast. He also offers a reminder that resonates beyond real estate: a tenant who pays $750 on time is worth more than one who is supposed to pay $950 but pays late. His goal is to move average rents from about $750 toward the roughly $915 the neighborhood supports, gradually rather than by pushing out existing tenants.
Managing From Thousands of Miles Away
Jullion’s building is run day to day by a third-party property management company that charges 8 percent of collected rent, which he describes as standard for his Michigan market, where fees typically run 8 to 10 percent. That doesn’t make the investment hands-off for him. As the asset manager, he reviews every expense, pulls reports through the management company’s online portal, and asks questions when something looks off, such as an unusually large trip to the hardware store. He also sends regular newsletters to his investors and makes himself available for calls.
He’s candid that the early months haven’t been easy. Four months after buying the building, it hasn’t yet produced a profit. A water intrusion in July forced the team to put two tenants up in a hotel, and the property has been relying on reserves while it stabilizes. He says the building had positive cash flow in the most recent month, but not yet enough to fully cover the mortgage. It’s a refreshingly honest reminder that even well-researched investments come with surprises.
What Passive Investors Can Expect
Seb points out that for most of his audience, the realistic path isn’t becoming an apartment operator but becoming a passive investor in someone else’s deal. Jullion agrees. For investors in his current building, the projections call for roughly two dollars back for every dollar invested over a five-year hold, a 16 percent IRR, and an average cash-on-cash return of about 6 percent, with quarterly distributions when the building generates income. He is careful to say there are no guarantees in investing, and that his biggest promise is transparency, both when things go well and when they don’t.
He also stresses that this kind of investment isn’t for money you might need soon. His plan is to hold the building for about five years, possibly refinancing in year two or three to return much of investors’ capital. Getting out early is very limited and generally requires the investor to find someone to buy their share. That’s why he has frank conversations up front to make sure investors are a good fit.
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The Tax Advantage Most People Miss
When Seb asks whether investors benefit from depreciation, Jullion explains one of the biggest perks of commercial real estate: a cost segregation study. This type of study breaks a building into its components, such as appliances, flooring, and parking lots, so that some of them can be depreciated much faster than the building itself. The result can be larger tax deductions in the early years of ownership, which flow through to investors. The IRS Cost Segregation Audit Techniques Guide outlines how these studies are reviewed. Jullion paid about $2,800 for the study on his 23-unit building, a cost he expects to be far outweighed by the tax savings.
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Investing in Yourself First
Jullion credits much of his progress to mentors and education. He names Justin Brennan’s multifamily program for teaching him the operations side, and Hunter Thompson for helping him build the systems, investor communication, and capital-raising infrastructure that turned his first deal into a real business. He also pushes back on the “no money down” late-night TV pitches of decades past. There are many ways to get into real estate, he says, including helping other operators find deals while they raise the money. But for the general partner, apartment investing is anything but passive. The deal is passive for his investors precisely because he is doing the work.
What hooked him in the first place was selling his first house and receiving a $100,000 wire transfer. That moment, he says, taught him how money works through real assets, and the math of apartment buildings convinced him to go bigger. Now that he has the skills to put deals together and raise capital, he plans to keep growing, knowing that scaling up means bringing others along.
Make Your Money Work for You
What runs through the entire conversation is a disciplined, almost unemotional approach to real estate: verify every claim, make every dollar earn its place, and be honest with investors when things don’t go to plan. For listeners in their sixties and beyond, Jullion’s story offers a clear look at what passive apartment investing really involves, including the potential returns, the tax benefits, the long holding periods, and the very real risks. His parting advice is a fitting summary for anyone thinking about how to fund the next twenty or thirty years: you already work hard for your money, so find a way to make your money work for you.
For listeners who want to learn more, Jullion has created a free resource, The Busy Professional’s Guide to Passive Apartment Investing, available on his website, where you can also reach out to him directly.
This episode summary is for educational purposes only and is not investment, tax, or legal advice. Private real estate investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal, and are often illiquid. Speak with a licensed financial professional before investing.