Mark Shuler

“I’m not crying in my soup, but my parents divorced when I was young, and we moved around a lot afterwards. No one ever mistook me for an athlete and I never had movie-star good looks. I was never an extrovert or any kind of a public speaker to begin with. The one thing I had going for me was that I was always one of the smartest guys in t”

Interviewed by Jonathan Rozek for Ten Paths. David Lindahl was not involved in editing these interviews.

Mark: I'm from a blue-collar, working-class family who worked the line in Detroit. Career advancement was becoming a forklift operator.

I’m not crying in my soup, but my parents divorced when I was young, and we moved around a lot afterwards. No one ever mistook me for an athlete and I never had movie-star good looks. I was never an extrovert or any kind of a public speaker to begin with. The one thing I had going for me was that I was always one of the smartest guys in the room. So I played the hand I was dealt, and I just figured it out as I got through life.

I ended up in Virginia for high school and managed to get out of there, thank God. I’m not a southerner and I just did not want to be there. I moved back to Michigan where I'm from, right after high school.

Jon: Were you told or expected to be in a certain line of work when you grew up?

Mark: Not really, but I'm from Detroit. I don't know if you've known people from Detroit, but there's kind of an attitude. My dad was an old Detroit boy. He was also an honorably discharged Air Force officer. One of eight guys out of 110 in his officer’s class to survive WWII. Statistically speaking, you and I should not be sitting here having this conversation. I’ve always felt a little luck played a hand in my life.

And so my role model was always discipline, leadership, honor, and integrity. All those military values my dad learned during his time in the service were instilled in me from a young age. Also, my brothers and I just always had a work ethic, and all of us are now entrepreneurs.

We're all highly successful, but to be clear we were not born with any silver spoons or trust funds. Neither of my parents went to college, but somehow they instilled in us this drive to go out and make our way in the world. It was a given that you had to make it on your own. A definite bootstrap mentality.

Jon: Were you expected to go into the service?

Mark: No I wasn’t, but when I look back on my life, I do wonder if I should have. It would have been a good four years, and I probably would have grown up faster. But I always knew that I wanted to go to college, and what I wanted to do afterward. I'm a practicing architect and I just knew from the age of 10 that I was going to be an architect.

Truth is I’m sort of an idiot savant. As a kid, I was always designing and building stuff. In fact, I designed my first building when I was three years old, and I executed my first project when I was 14.

Jon: I don't want to cross a line or anything, but were you supported in your dream to become an architect?

Mark: No one ever accused my dad of being a rocket scientist, but he was always willing to let us become our own person. He had this salt-of-the-earth wisdom, and the older I've gotten, the more I’ve appreciated it. He just really understood that it's easier to grow a healthy child than to fix a broken adult.

It was all boys in my family and he just let us be guys. I had three brothers plus my dad was previously married, so I also have an older brother and an older sister. But I only grew up with my three brothers. Growing up in Detroit we were hellions, and he just let us do our thing.

We were very competitive in my family and it was sink or swim. You just got it done, and there were no excuses for failure. Maybe you failed, but that didn’t matter. You certainly were not allowed to wallow in self-pity or throw anyone else under the bus—if you failed, you failed on your own merits. You got up, dusted your kneecaps off and you got back to work. Failure is a great teacher. I've had some spectacular failures in my life, and they taught me a lot.

That's the big advantage I have in life—my work ethic. I know plenty of people who come from money, and some of them are absolute morons. They just lack fire in the belly. I've never been impressed with people who were born into wealth and who made their money the old-fashioned way: by inheriting it. I’ve never been impressed by anyone’s lucky circumstances.

I live in Seattle and there are a lot of “.com lottery” winners here. I have dealt with more overnight millionaires than I care to think about, and I am still unimpressed by that kind of wealth.

Jon: You’re not impressed by the Lamborghinis that they rent?

Mark: No, not at all. Lotto winners don’t really build anything, and most of the time they don’t start a business. They just happened to be at Microsoft or Amazon, at the right place, at the right time. So big effing deal. But their money is green. I’ve honed my chops and have had a long, successful architectural career out here in Seattle servicing that crowd. These folks have afforded me the chance to build a couple of businesses and I am OK with the fact that someone's got to be rich. So, yeah, I'll cash their checks.

Luckily, I happen to still enjoy what I do for a living. I was sitting here working on a project right before you called. At the end of the day, you can make all the excuses in the world and put all the obstacles in front of you that you want. But success is all a mind game. If you want to be successful in life—especially this line of work—just calm your mind down. Go out for a run, go meditate, do whatever you do, so you can chillax and just freeze out those negative thoughts. Do it and then get back to work.

The hardest part of real estate investing is commitment. I teach a lot of classes and I relay that message in almost every class. I mean, you either want to succeed as an investor or you don't. The people who are most successful in this line of work just effing get out of their own way and find a way to get it done. I’ll say it again—this business is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work and you are either wired to enjoy that endeavor, or you're not. If you don't like having to get over obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, then maybe this is not the line of work for you and that's OK. In that case, you can still participate in deals—you just may want to do it as a passive investor.

I prefer to be the sponsor. Yeah, I like being a general partner in a deal. I also like getting up, going out in the field, getting my hands dirty, and directing traffic on these rehabs. We do these big, big rehabs on our projects.

Jon: How big?

Mark: As much as $30,000 per door on our renovations. I mean, we're tearing everything apart and putting it back together. I've bought some legitimate F Class buildings where I practically tore the place down to the studs.

Earlier this year we bought a 700-unit deal. We bought it in two parts, and there were just decades of deferred maintenance. There was gang activity in the units and a couple of shootings before we bought the place. We've had to evict over 125 people out of the property, and by this week we got all but the last 10 of them out of there. We're turning a corner, but it's been a lot of work.

Jon: How does your work as an architect relate to what you do as a real estate investor?

Mark: Honestly, they really don't have much to do with each other, other than the attitude and the work ethic that I bring to both. The design, engineering, and entitlement world is vastly different from going out, finding a deal, underwriting it, putting it all together, starting the money raise on it, creating the documents, closing it, and then managing it for five years. It's a very different game.

The real cross-over is my business skills. We’ve now built a large, vertically integrated company where we're not just sponsors, but asset managers and contractors. We have 100 people on the payroll right now, and we do everything. We order our products from overseas and have them shipped to Houston. We send our driver down to the port, back our truck up, grab the container, haul it off to our warehouse and rack the items. When we need something, we send a driver out and he grabs it.

We get most of our stuff from India: doors, toilets, slab granite countertops, vessel sinks, flooring, lighting, and a lot of the finished goods. We order about 60% of our rehab supplies from overseas and pay 20 cents on the dollar for them. When we order doors, we’ll order 1,000 at a time. We’ll get 1,000 sinks at a time. Even compared to wholesale, we’re still only paying 20 cents on the dollar.

Jon: That's amazing. Before we get too far into the present, could you fill me in on your background after you moved back to Michigan?

Mark: I moved to Ann Arbor after Virginia, and I was in Ann Arbor for 12 years. I went there for college, and then architecture school. Afterward, I spent five years there getting my career off the ground. I also used that as my base of operations, because I traveled a lot in my mid to late 20s.

But then I was approaching 30, and I had been in this small college town since I was 18. I knew I wanted to be in a bigger city and do more-challenging projects. My sister lived in Oregon and I liked the west coast so I settled on Seattle. My timing was perfect, because Seattle was about to start a 30-year expansion cycle. The house I bought in 1997 is now worth five to six times what I paid for it. I wish I could have seen that coming in my 20s. Sometimes you’re dealt a lucky hand.

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