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140: JP Newman – $1.8 Billion In Real Estate Transactions While Changing People’s Lives
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Show Notes
Imagine making a profit while also making a difference.
Many people believe that’s not possible, that these two things are mutually exclusive. But this mindset is holding back progress!
Today, Brad Weimert sits down with JP Newman, the founder, CEO, and managing principal of Thrive FP. Thrive FP is a real estate company specializing in the syndication and management of multifamily apartment units.
Thrive FP integrates the principles of conscious capitalism into its business model, ensuring that all stakeholders—investors, residents, and employees—benefit from their operations. This approach emphasizes both profitability and social responsibility.
Brad and JP discuss his transition from the entertainment industry to real estate and how to create businesses that make a profit and a difference.
Tune in!
Inspiring Quotes
- “How you act in your business is how you act in your life.” – JP Newman
- “If you lack the confidence to pursue, you never get off the starting line.” – Brad Weimert
- “It all came down to me. I had to learn to take all those setbacks, and I had to learn how to thrive from them.” – JP Newman
- “I don’t believe in altruism. I do not think that concept exists.” – Brad Weimert
- “The difference between those who execute and those who don’t is the willingness to push.” – Brad Weimert
- “Purpose took me out of my depression.” – JP Newman
Key Takeaways
- 00:00:00 Is college worth it?
- 00:04:12 Parenting advice
- 00:06:54 How JP got to where he is now
- 00:09:53 Transitioning from entertainment to real estate
- 00:30:20 Discovering purpose through depression
- 00:41:26 Creative capitalism and integrating purpose into business
- 00:47:35 The future of JPs real estate business
- 00:52:55 The current state of the multifamily market
- 01:10:43 Outro
Full Transcript
00:00
JP Newman
Started my own independent company, and I produced a film called where the Red Fern grows that Disney released. The guy funds my project, decides he’s going to screw me. All my savings I spent literally in a legal battle.
00:10
Brad Weimert
You were broke at 35?
00:12
JP Newman
Yeah.
00:12
Brad Weimert
Today you have something just shy of 20,000 apartment units and have sold 2 billion in transactions.
00:18
JP Newman
2 billion transactions? Yeah.
00:19
Brad Weimert
For a 25 year old starting in real estate. What do you suggest they do? Wow. What did it take for you to get to the place where that transition happened?
00:34
JP Newman
Depression.
00:35
Brad Weimert
But you had money at that point.
00:36
JP Newman
The money kept rolling in. I was highly functional, but completely in a psychological hole.
00:41
Brad Weimert
Do you think that you could have gotten to the point of transition had you not become financially successful? Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine, and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert, and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology, and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics, and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine, and ten figure businesses.
01:29
Brad Weimert
Life can get exciting beyond a million today. I’ve got a great friend of mine, JP Newman, who has done over close to $2 billion in real estate transactions, almost 20,000 apartment units, and lives with the notion of conscious capitalism. Being at the. I don’t know about you, but I have a very hard time learning theory from somebody that I know has not executed.
01:56
JP Newman
It’d be like having a 450 pound, you know, coach teaching you about fitness.
02:00
Brad Weimert
Yep.
02:01
JP Newman
So last week, as I wrote a big check last week for my kids school, it’s one of the most expensive schools that turns out University of Miami, although I have to say, it’s very, it’s cool looking. They have their own beach. I mean, that’s something, right? But I’m sitting there and they’re talking about what they’re going to teach my kid as a business major. And they said, by the first year, your kid’s going to have a resume and he’ll have his own LinkedIn page. And I’m like, holy shit, that’s the objective. I just wrote you a huge check, and my kid is going to have a LinkedIn page. My kid’s already flipped a slide. Are you serious? But they’re doing their best. It is really. It feels like you’re just doing it because you’re in America, and thank God.
02:44
JP Newman
Maybe if you’re in a position to do it, but if it really was. If it came down, is this really necessary? I just. Hard to convince me that this current system creates the necessary skills.
02:54
Brad Weimert
I don’t know many people that are convinced of that these days. No, certainly not that generation.
02:59
JP Newman
Yeah.
02:59
Brad Weimert
Right?
03:00
JP Newman
Yeah. They’re gearing you towards being able to get your first job, so you’re gonna spend four more years in college so that some big firm is going to wisp you away and give your first job at the average price. Average income, they were bragging, is $77,000 would be your first job out of college. And you and I both know, first of all, like, the days of a company’s gonna. An IBM or a Deloitte’s gonna come and take you, and you’re gonna work there for 25 years, and you’re gonna sit at a cubicle and work your way up. Like, first off, who’s interested in that story? And the answer is maybe somebody. I don’t know.
03:34
Brad Weimert
Dude, average tenure these days is something.
03:36
JP Newman
Like two to four years, I was gonna say. So you’re gonna prepare for four years so that you can get some crap ass job from some big firm? Does it really matter? Versus everything else that’s out there right now in the world?
03:46
Brad Weimert
Yeah, also, you know, whatever that is. $6,400 a month.
03:50
JP Newman
Right.
03:50
Brad Weimert
You know, and you’re talking about living in a space now where the gig economy, it’s not that difficult to get ten grand a month quickly if he.
03:59
JP Newman
Actually had to pay for college or go and get scholarships or get loans, get student loans. The cost of this education, to pay it back. You do the math on that. How many years it would take to. To pay that back? It would take you six, seven years just to pay college back. You know, when my kid was 13 or 14, I guess, when Covid hit, we found a mask that had metal in it from Israel. It was, like, this metal mask that would actually kill the germs.
04:21
Brad Weimert
Whoa.
04:21
JP Newman
And my son became a wholesaler. He called him became a wholesaler, and he made, like, five grand in selling these masks, and everybody wanted one. Like, he didn’t have to try that hard. And I saw, like, the self confidence of. And he had to manage the inventory, manage the money, and it wasn’t a crazy, hard business, but I literally said he was at home, had nothing to do, and I could tell he was going crazy. And I just kind of threw. Because I saw this mask in a magazine, and I’m like, I’m going to buy one. That’s great. I don’t want to sit there if it’s got Cochrane or whatever. And they say it’s hospital grade. And he did the research, and then everything kind of, like, let him. I helped him. I gave him some container, but he just did it.
04:58
JP Newman
But that self confidence. And I had a similar experience growing up, where I actually was selling calculators. Like, calculators. I was buying from $3, and I was selling them for $10. I was seven years old, going door to door with a briefcase as a kid, and I made my first thing. I made $500. That confidence, you know, making $500. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it was a game changer for me. I kept trying other things because it gave me the confidence to explore and try other things.
05:26
Brad Weimert
I don’t know where it came from for me, but when I was very young, I mean, when I was, like, six, my parents retell this story all the time, but I was. I think I was younger than that. I was downtown Ann Arbor with my older sister.
05:36
JP Newman
Yeah.
05:36
Brad Weimert
And they were like, hey, we’re gonna run to the store. We’ll be right back. I was standing there with my sister, and I was like, we should go to McDonald’s. And she was like, we can’t. We don’t have our parents. And I was like, I have money. I don’t need parents.
05:47
JP Newman
Isn’t that great?
05:48
Brad Weimert
Yeah, but it was the realization of, this is the lever. Then it was just, how do you get money? How do you make money?
05:54
JP Newman
Yeah, this is back to the rich dad, poor dad thing. I think that my dad set me up enough and then let me figure it out. Giving me that experience where I had some success, I think was a game changer for my trajectory of willing to try their things, willing to fail, willing to succeed. It followed a bunch of other things, and now, to this day, I joke and say in my life, the day that I make money, and I’m having fun on the same day, like, if I’m on the ski slopes and I get a call at a certain check in, it started at a very young age. Now I call it my fairest Bueller day. So my fairest Bueller day is, I’m having the best day of my life. And money came in. Lots of conversations before he went off to Miami.
06:33
JP Newman
The last thing he asked me to do was a liquor run for him, which I thought was pretty funny.
06:38
Brad Weimert
Oh, you’re smiling.
06:41
JP Newman
You know, you’re in that moment of your goodbye. He’s like, hey, dad, before you go, I could use some Heineken.
06:47
Brad Weimert
That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Okay, so I want to get back to how we got to this. I want to get to how we got to this moment. But let’s start with how you got to. Now, you mentioned the impression of entrepreneurship from your father. Yeah. But I also know. I know little bits of your story. One is that you were broke at 35.
07:07
JP Newman
Yeah. Two is that today about 33 started making money out. Yeah, about 33.
07:11
Brad Weimert
Today, you have something just shy of 20,000 apartment units.
07:15
JP Newman
Yes.
07:16
Brad Weimert
And have sold close to $2 billion in real estate or had 2 billion in transactions.
07:20
JP Newman
Transactions, yeah.
07:22
Brad Weimert
How did you start an entrepreneurship, and what was the initial journey? Like?
07:27
JP Newman
Literally, again, I think I feel like every lesson from the one I just shared with you, like, being a young kid with a briefcase, has kind of led to a really entrepreneurial streak in me. I actually. I thought I was gonna be pre law. Like, I thought I’d be, like, a nice jewish lawyer, until I realized I didn’t wanna go to law school. Like, I was studying for my LSAts. And I’m like, no. And it really led to a spin. I spent a lot of my twenties, and I think that’s why I was such a late bloomer in life. I spent a lot of my twenties just trying to figure it out. And I joke and say, I think I had one of the worst stories at a party that you could have.
07:54
JP Newman
I was broke and single and just really trying to figure it out for a long time. I actually was doing some real estate. I fixed and flipped a few homes, but I hadn’t quite found my love yet. I did just. I wanted to find something that really appealed to me. I think passion is so important, and I think having the courage to have a bad story for a while where you go to a party, like, what are you up to? And I’m figuring it out. I mean, I know it sounds painful, and everybody wants to, like, have that kick ass story. I think that pain and that humility also got me the courageous to actually take a little more time to figure out what I love. It actually started out, I’d say my MBA was. I worked for Sony Pictures.
08:29
JP Newman
I was vice president of family entertainment. I actually produced animation for, like, almost nine years. I worked for toy companies. I produced animation. I was flying around the world. I was producing for Sony when DVD’s were still a thing. Damn. I was doing DVD’s and I was. I basically was youngest vice president, you know, in a large division. And they kind of said to me, where’s Sony? We don’t have a lot of, like, kids films like Disney. Can you help us create a family library? But the truth was, no one was super interested internally because they were making, like, the cool, like, miramax. It was called screen gems. They were making, like, the Mirror Max films. So they didn’t really want to deal with the kids stuff.
09:04
JP Newman
So they kind of, like, left me alone, and I was like 28 years old, and that was just awesome. Wow, that was pretty good. Jim Henson. We were doing all kinds of good stuff. You know, bear in the big blue house and Swan princess. We did a lot of cool stuff back then. I actually was in the first days of CGI, so I got to actually produced the first holiday special for CB’s with CGI. So it was like, right when the toy stories were coming out, I was producing things that they said was impossible to do. I got a quote for 22 million from Sony to produce this 48 Minutes Christmas special for CB’s, and I got it done for three and a half million from a little shop in Toronto.
09:39
Brad Weimert
Did you get to keep the difference?
09:40
JP Newman
Yeah, no, actually, it’s funny, at Sony, and this is big corporate America, I actually was looked as a trader. Like, it wasn’t looked as a good thing that I saved my division $16 million. They saw me as a trader for not going with the Sony brand.
09:52
Brad Weimert
Oh, wow.
09:53
JP Newman
Yeah, yeah. So that was pretty, that was a pretty interesting experience. I had Carl’s junior and Hardee’s. Like, it became this national promotion over my little. My little story. It was called the nuttiest Nutcracker, and it was five stories telling the stories of the Nutcracker with Jim Belushi and all these, like, really fun actors and stuff like that. I was really proud of it that, you know, we figured stuff out. There was a thing out called veggietales. I remember veggietales or not, but it was veggietales. Washington, that’s wholesome. The most wholesome thing. And I decided to put a little twist on it. So it was super fun. And, you know, I think from there, I realized that working at Sony in the entertainment career, like, I actually went independent.
10:27
JP Newman
I produced a film called where the Red Fern grows that Disney released with Dave Matthews and Alison Krause. Did the music, and it was actually. Here’s the ironic part about that. I was independent at that point. I had left, started my own independent company, and that was a big deal to get redfern. Redfern grows is considered one of the hundred most important books american culture I.
10:46
Brad Weimert
Remember very well. I was forced to read it when I was a child.
10:49
JP Newman
Yeah, everyone’s forced to read it. So I got to american canon, and this was a remake. The original was made in 74, and we did the remake of it. And here’s the ironic thing of how life throws you a curveball. So the guy I got to finance it for me was in real estate in Texas, and I knew nothing about real estate or Texas. And I’m just a Hollywood la kid. And so the guy funds my project. I get Disney to release it. I get Dave Matthews, Allison Krause. I was like, it was a really great film. I’m really proud of it. So the guy in the end of the day decides he’s gonna screw me.
11:22
JP Newman
Once he met Dave Matthews and Allison, and he’s going to France, and he’s like, he decides even though our contract was rock solid, like, I don’t mess around with contracts. And I was about 31 at this point. I left Sony. He goes, look, I’m super rich off of real estate. You’re not. You’re poor still. Like, I’m just gonna screw you and toy with you. He goes, so, look, I know your contract’s good, but I’m not gonna honor it. He’s like, I’ll give you like, a third what you know, and I’m gonna change your title even though you produced it. I’m gonna give you a lesser title. I’m gonna give myself a bigger title. And it was a really interesting, you know, he was at that point, living in LA, and he started a production company. Like, basically I.
11:58
JP Newman
He used me and launched me, and then, you know, used that film to. To do some, you know, he was a bad guy. And I got a lawyer, and by the time I paid my lawyers and I took it on contingency, you know, it was much. I put two and a half years of my life into that film, and I got paid much less. And it actually, I got paid so much less than I. By the time I paid my lawyers and settled, and they were using the most expensive lawyers they could, they were just trying to out lawyer me at that point. I think my lawyers knew I was right, but even they were feeling the pain of, like, what this they did. I think I had a realization at that point.
12:30
JP Newman
I was just met the woman who was going to become my wife. My. You met my wife, Janet. And I kind of dreamed of financial freedom, and I just realized that, like, I couldn’t be with intellectual property, like films, which I love to produce.
12:45
Brad Weimert
Let me ask you this. There are lots of things that I want to highlight there. One is this reminder of, it matters who you work with.
12:54
JP Newman
Oh, it does.
12:54
Brad Weimert
And Gary Keller is known for saying that he refers to contracts as disagreements, not as agreements, because they’re only relevant when you disagree. But that’s also only true if you can enforce them. Your example is a beautiful reason of why it’s so important to be careful with who you work with.
13:13
JP Newman
Yeah.
13:14
Brad Weimert
What are the other lessons that you got from that experience?
13:17
JP Newman
Well, it changed my entire career. Cause I realized that intellectual property at the time, it’s still kind of like the saying is that you have so little control over your destiny because you need a now you need Netflix, you need an Amazon. At the time, you needed a Sony. You need a movie studio or. So I was getting people to actually back me. I had, like, ten really cool ideas when I had my own production company. But I realized that everyone was smiling and saying, JP, these are phenomenal. But then I always joke and say, if the phone doesn’t ring the next day from the business development person, it doesn’t matter what they say to you. It wasn’t happening.
13:49
JP Newman
So the reason why I switched to real estate was I figured, how do I take intellectual property, the joy that I get from creating things, and how can I do that with real property? Because with real property, like real estate, I have a lot more control of my destiny. I don’t need an MTV. I don’t need a studio to say yes. So it took that away. It also put me into a tailspin for almost two years of depression. So it wasn’t like, an easy decision because obviously, going from the south of France and working with Reese Witherspoon on voicing things and just doing really cool stuff to, like, oh, my God, now I’m doing dusty commercial real estate in Louisiana and Texas. Like, what happened to my life?
14:29
Brad Weimert
That’s an interesting place to start for entrepreneurship, because from the beginning, you had other people funding things, whether it was Sony or. You were raising money from Redford.
14:39
JP Newman
Yeah, always.
14:41
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Were you aware of the financial structure of funding the movie at that point in time? Like today, film credits are, you know, a viable tax option. Right. Did you understand the underpinning of the business side of financing I did, because.
14:54
JP Newman
Remember, I was vice president of acquisition at Sony and production. So I was the guy who would either license content, or produce content. So if anything, I think of Sony as my MBA in really business. Like the MBA I never got, I got after being at Sony for five years. But it was nice having a team of lawyers behind you and business development people. So you get things done, and you were the movie studio, so you were the 800 pound gorilla, so it pretty much would always go your way. Like, it wasn’t a difficult negotiation. But I certainly understood international film rights, tv rights. Like, I’m well adept from that experience. Wild.
15:28
Brad Weimert
It also, you know, one of the things that I don’t think I ever could have done it, but one of the things that I frequently say when people ask me if I would have done something differently, it is working for somebody that knew what they were doing instead of just trying to do it all myself from the beginning, for sure. And that sounds like you got a lot of that there.
15:46
JP Newman
That really was my discipline. I was spinning for a long time. I have funny stories of parking cars in Hollywood for the movie stars. Like, I was just doing. I was in boiler room sales in my twenties. I literally just did a little bit of everything. And that really did give me a lot of structure that I would even credit today. That some of my, you know, like, some of my success at thrive, my current company, my real estate company, was the discipline I got from understanding how large companies work. And even to this day, when I’m presenting to larger institutions, I think that institutional experience is like, I get it. I get the politics, I get the mindset. I kind of know how to talk, who to talk to, who matters.
16:19
JP Newman
I just actually had a pretty big win because right now, with banks right now, it’s a tough time in real estate. So it’s like, even. How do you keep.
16:27
Brad Weimert
You don’t say, yeah, it’s August of 24.
16:31
JP Newman
Yeah. And I just had a really tricky situation where I was very close to a very serious foreclosure on a large project, like a $50 million project. I knew that I’d gone as far as I had gone with this group and that the only way that I was going to save my ass on this one was going to be to get to somebody higher in this corporation. It’s a very. It’s a bank, and I was a very big bank with a very large corporation headquartered. I mean, I didn’t have a network, and I had a, literally, I joked and called it my amazing race moment, where I had to literally figure out how to get to, like, towards the top and plead my case. And if I didn’t, I would have lost this project.
17:08
JP Newman
And it turned out I got through LinkedIn, through amazing race, through every, you know, through a little bit of luck, we’ll call it. I’ll even give the divine a little credit. What do you call it? Joe Dispenza would call it source and fourth dimension. You know, like living in the quantum. Whatever it was, I was able to plead my case in a way that I got heard that saved my project. So even to this day, it’s like understanding corporate structure and talking to the right person. When someone says no to you, can you go higher? And how even when it seems impossible, this one was impossible. I mean, it made no sense. It was so hard. If I told you the bank and how large they were, like, it was impossible. But we just did it.
17:48
Brad Weimert
I just had this conversation with my assistant last night, actually, and she was like, yeah, but I couldn’t do it. Like, this was no. And I was like, listen, if you’re going to accept the no’s from people, this is not going to work out. Like, the difference between the people that execute in life and those that don’t have are that they’re willing to push. And it’s just a question of how hard you’re pushing and when it feels impossible and when it doesn’t. Right. And we know through going through a bunch of experiences that there’s tons of stuff other people would accept that we won’t, because once you’ve gone through it a bunch of times, you’re like, oh, no, that’s not how that actually works. Or it doesn’t have to work that way. Yeah, and here’s why.
18:25
Brad Weimert
And then there are things where you’re like, oh, shit. So I applaud you for that. It sounds like. Sounds like, yeah, you can’t give me the details on. Yeah, that. But that’s a big project to potentially have go sideways, you know?
18:38
JP Newman
You know, another thing was really a really big project, and if I. I wish I could tell you more of the details, but it worked out so well in the end. Like, the cooperation I got, it went from, like, get your lawyers ready. Just get ready. Just get ready for a battle with us and get ready to give us the keys total cooperation. And. And by the way, it’s gonna work out great for everyone. Just that it’s already working out great. Like, it’s. So it’s just funny. Like, literally getting there. But to credit, I think this is really important. It actually was not my idea. I was feeling pretty stuck. Like, I have the courage as an entrepreneur, like you said, but it wasn’t even my idea. It’s like having friends like you and having other friends in the community.
19:16
JP Newman
Like, when I had a friend who literally were at dinner, he just looked up to me so innocently. He’s like, I was actually in your situation once, and here’s what I did. And he’s like, why don’t you try that? And at first, the minute he said it to me, I was almost like, oh, I can’t do that. You don’t understand. My story is different than yours. Like, you did it, but, like, this is much bigger of a bank. This is like. And he looked at me like, so, like. And I love that about, like, this is where your friends and your community matters. Everything. He was, he really was looking like, dude, stop. Like, stop with your smallness. Like, just, you’re, you just go. Just go do it. And I. And literally something went off in me. Like, I gotta fight.
19:51
JP Newman
Because you know what? This is big. This is a lot of money I’m protecting. And my fight, rather than my flight instinct just kicked in. Like, I have no idea if this is gonna work, but I need to give this my all.
20:04
Brad Weimert
That’s wild. I love that I echo that in so many different scenarios in my life. There have been so many situations where somebody has said something and I’ve been like, oh, shit, it hurts. You’re right.
20:15
JP Newman
I know. Doesn’t it hurt sometimes? Oh, I don’t wanna get the courage to do that. It was amazing.
20:20
Brad Weimert
Well, sometimes it’s also, it’s not just the courage. It’s also sometimes you’re stuck in your life and having an outside perspective is what it takes to break you out of your brain, immediately stopping you, because a lot of the time your brain just says, well, that’s not an option. We operate from what we call the one three one inside the company, and that is that if you are going to come to me with a problem, you better come with three solutions and then give me what you suggest we do as the one solution that we go with.
20:47
JP Newman
I love that.
20:48
Brad Weimert
One of the mechanisms that is at play there is if you have a problem and you immediately go to, this is the solution, or you have a problem, you immediately go to, this can’t work in both cases, even if you think you have the solution right away, you have to get outside of your box and say, are there other possible solutions that will give you a better outcome? It also prevents people from just dumping their shit on me and being like, here’s my problem, can you fix it for me? I should not be. I am not, and I should not be the smart person in the company that’s fixing problems. I have people around that are smarter in many areas, that are the more experienced in many areas. They should be providing the solutions and working through it.
21:28
JP Newman
As I get older, through business, I really realize that a good leader is really a good coach. Right? So, like, to your point, like, that realization, especially from a founder, one founder to another founder, it’s like, I think I was really good at letting go. I wasn’t always good at, like, providing. You know, even I could provide the vision because I’m a visionary. But then how do you provide the infrastructure to back the vision? And I’m still, to be honest, I actually am being coached right now on this as a work in progress. Part of my excitement, quite frankly, right now in what I’m calling thrive 2.0, which is being addressed, growing my company in the next real estate cycles. It’s actually my own personal challenge of, can I be that leader?
22:06
JP Newman
Can I be that coach that can do just exactly what you’re saying? That really can take the vision, but then provide the infrastructure where everyone knows individually what they’re doing and then collectively what they’re rowing to and how it all connects together. And I think in the first cycle, which kind of started after Sony, kind of from flipping homes, you can go through it from flipping homes to just kind of growing this business to getting to about $2 billion in transactions has just been a process, basically, of just learning how to do that. But I realized that in the first cycle, and again, look at Austin, Texas, how it grew. It was almost like you caught a wave. And I was just lucky enough.
22:40
JP Newman
And I give, like, people like Mike Dillard and other people who believed in me early, a lot of credit, they brought investors, they trusted me, and thank God I had enough skill to not screw it up. So I joke, it was like this big economic wave came, which was this real estate wave that came. And I think a lot of people would just miss the wave, just like surfers miss a wave. Why’d you miss it? You didn’t have the money. You didn’t have the experience. Well, at that point, I had left Sony. I had enough experience to not screw it up and actually surf.
23:07
JP Newman
I might not have been the best surfer, but I had enough gumption experience, hopefully integrity all the good stuff, customer service, that I was able to build a business from all that momentum and that there was enough intelligence in providing good deals that it all worked. But I think in 2.0, the idea is, how do we refine that skill for me as a leader and then put in the right team that people who are smarter than me, who can execute, incentivize them the right way, clearly tell them what it is, incentivize them the right way, so that we can grow this thing even bigger. And that just sounds. Because if I had to do the same thing in rinse and repeat, I think this would be really boring and I would even consider just not doing it. Quite frankly, it just.
23:45
JP Newman
That’s not fun as a creative person to probably just like you always want to try a new challenge. And I think this is a hard challenge for me. It’s like. Cause a lot of founders aren’t great leaders, especially when it comes to organizations. I don’t know that I am, by the way, either.
23:57
Brad Weimert
Yeah, no, I am very, look, I am very, very slowly learning this lesson and how to do this. And I have historically not been good at it, but it has become more and more clear to me both how important it is if you want to actually have a better lever, and also how important it has ended up being from a purpose perspective, where uplifting the team and the people around me has actually become a core driver, as opposed to me just building and making money. In the beginning, I had heard that, and I just, I heard people say that, oh, yeah, it’s about the team. And I’m like, yeah, yeah.
24:40
JP Newman
Okay, put the poster over there. Right, right. Teamwork.
24:44
Brad Weimert
Right. And going through this journey like there is actually a transformation of my values have changed or aligned differently is probably a better way to look at it.
24:56
JP Newman
Yeah, I think we both have our friends. Jennifer Hooty Moscow, you know, and so Jennifer actually recently was on my podcast a couple weeks ago.
25:03
Brad Weimert
Awesome.
25:03
JP Newman
And she was saying that it’s innate in all of us for, like, humans. Like, when they go to. When they go to work to feel like they’re connected to a mission, and if they don’t, it’s not like you can’t get work out of them, but it’s almost like a human need to provide that and you. And if you want to get people really flourishing when they feel like they’re part of something bigger than just making the owner money, you get a different team and you get a whole different energy. And she says, you know, she’s done 3000 of these vivid visions. And she just says that you can just, you can see company from company where that works and how that company blooms energetically, collectively, versus companies that just aren’t set up for that.
25:39
Brad Weimert
Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the initial real estate transactions and how it led to thrive FP right now, because I think it’s very uncommon for people to start with this grand vision that pulls them through their whole life. And the examples of the people that are there are astounding, right? You look at, from the sports stars to the business stars, you know, you look at the Michael Jordan that in high school figured it out theoretically. You look at Tiger woods, who was pushed and figured it out at a very young age, or Serena Williams. Those are, their entire life is driven by purpose or, you know, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, grand vision. But for most of us, I don’t fucking know what the grand vision is, totally.
26:24
Brad Weimert
And so my default is just keep moving and figure it out as you go. And the more clear I can get the picture over time, the more momentum, the faster it goes, the happier I am because I’m driving towards something bigger. But it sounds like you didn’t start with a vision.
26:40
JP Newman
No, I was definitely very far from the Tiger woods and very much just fake it till you make it. And I think one of the things that was actually depressing to me when I got into real estate, because I should tell you, my father was a syndicator and basically thrive. We syndicate, meaning we have investors. We’ve got like 350 high net worth investors that put money alongside us. And we basically buy mostly multifamily apartments. We also do lending on real estate lending. And it just seemed really flat to me. It felt very one dimensional at the time. Like, what have I done? How did I go from being a guy in the south of France to a guy who’s sitting in his childhood bedroom?
27:19
JP Newman
When he started, my dad was retired, so I was back in my childhood bedroom putting ads in the newspaper looking for small investors. That’s really what started. And I literally was freaking out. Like, I was just like, what happened to me? I mean, and it took a while. Yeah, I started with very small, like most real estate people, I started to small projects, including flipping houses. I started lending money, like doing bridge and hard money lending. My first one was a $77,000 house in Killeen. Boy, did I work my ass off. And right when I started launching Bernie Madoff and had just stolen all that money, there was like this whole thing of people freaking out of, like, scams that were going on.
27:59
JP Newman
So I couldn’t have picked a worse time from the standpoint of, and it was also a downturn, kind of like now. So yet people are fearful, as we know, even as of August 2024, people are fearful during downturns. And then there was a lot of, because literally money had just been stolen. There was a lot of investor fear. So number one for me was just like, how do I raise. Even at the time, it was like, how can I raise 500,000? How can I raise a million dollars? And it took a lot of creativity. And at the time, the cutting edge technology was just literally having Dropbox, and that seemed like such a small technology, but Dropbox and all those, like, first cloud, you know, based things.
28:36
Brad Weimert
I remember it was amazing to suddenly emails on all your computers, share them.
28:41
JP Newman
With people for the first time. I could tell potential investors, you don’t have to believe in me. You don’t have to trust me. Here are all the files, here’s the appraisal, here’s our underwriting. All you need to do, and by the way, if you want to, I don’t even need to see the money. You can send the check directly to the title company. Like, I don’t have touch your money. All you’re really buying from me. Would you have to believe in me? Look at the Dropbox. Just look at all the files if you want to. And believe that I know how to underwrite real estate. That’s what you’re paying me for to this day. By the way, if you think about it, if you invest with someone in real estate, why would you need a promoter or a syndicator?
29:12
JP Newman
If you can do it yourself, and I know you do some of your own real estate, the answer is you want someone like me to make you a really nice risk adjusted return. You’re paying me to do that. So you’re ultimately betting on the jockey, right, that they can do that 100%? Right?
29:27
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
29:28
JP Newman
So, well, hold on.
29:29
Brad Weimert
Explain this part to me, because you mentioned doing, first of all, presumably you made a good chunk of money working for Sony, and it sounds like not.
29:37
JP Newman
As much, but I spent it all on the legal fight with the guy. With the real estate guy.
29:41
Brad Weimert
Damn.
29:42
JP Newman
All my savings I spent literally in a legal battle.
29:44
Brad Weimert
That’s an important. Yeah, that’s an important note.
29:46
JP Newman
Because that’s why I was broke when you asked me why was I broke at 33? Cause I spent all that money in a legal battle.
29:53
Brad Weimert
Brutal. Brutal. So do you have any regrets about that? Do you wish you didn’t battle that person?
30:00
JP Newman
No, they got me here. Here. I wouldn’t be with you in the seat. Why the heck did I go from a Hollywood executive in LA? You know what? And I’ll tell you the answer. I should have had millions of dollars. I produced a successful film. You know, all my Tony Robbins. I was working my ass off. I was doing all the things. The most disciplined guy on the planet with nothing to show for it.
30:19
Brad Weimert
Ouch.
30:20
JP Newman
Nothing to show for it. I was single, broke, and all my friends. At that point, a lot of my friends had become doctors or professionals, so, really. But I think to this day that there’s a part of me that I think is more grateful for what I have. I think I’m gonna say I’m maybe a little more humble now because it was hard earned and I was a little more mature. I wasn’t the 25 year old tech, you know, tech kid who made it. Like, I had so many failures and so many things that I tried that I think it just. There’s just a different level of appreciation now for money. And I think that kind of segues a little bit to, like, the idea of, how did I go from, like, a boring real estate company more to purpose?
31:02
JP Newman
And I think all this. I think all this pain and all these setbacks actually made me say kind of what you were saying, like, there’s got to be more to this than just making money. What else is this about? How can I take some of the creativity from the days of Sony, and how can I infuse, how can I take animation or the things that I love to integrate a process, and how could I bring that to what seems to be a very boring business? Commercial real estate finance. I joke and say, I can say those words and almost put you to sleep. Commercial real estate finance. You ready to fall asleep? We’ll do it one more time. Well, you and I both are in the. We’re both in the finance worlds, right? It’s not inherently interesting.
31:39
JP Newman
And so a lot of my journey from, like, 33 on was, how can I infuse creativity and purpose and some progressiveness in an industry that’s not traditionally any of those things? And that was a lot of my journey that kind of made this whole thing a lot more interesting for me.
31:57
Brad Weimert
Can you think of a moment or a thing that started that path that triggered that?
32:03
JP Newman
Yeah, absolutely. Austin, as it was really just in its infancy of growing, decided it was going to host its own TEDx event. And I really was not thinking that much. And I had just heard John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, who’s now become a friend, but at the time, I just heard him on stage and John Mackey talking about conscious capitalism that every stakeholder needs to win. I just read Peter Diamantis’s book about abundance. Like, there is an unlimited abundance. Technology is bringing us to abundance and optimism. And then I went to this TeD conference. It was just an Austin local TEDx conference, and there was a guy speaking about his nine months he spent in the himalayas surviving. I forget he was on a survival thing, but for some reason he used the word thrive.
32:50
JP Newman
He’s like, in spite of all my challenge, in spite of all my setbacks that I’d gone through, I learned how to thrive. And something hit me. It like, literally hit me. It was like the word thrive, which became the name of my company, thrive FP. It all came down to me. I had to learn to take all those setbacks and I had to learn how to thrive from them. And so I literally renamed. My company was called at the time, principles capital funding. About as boring as you could be, right? Right?
33:16
Brad Weimert
Yes.
33:16
JP Newman
I mean, I’ll say it four times, and let’s see if you’re still awake.
33:19
Brad Weimert
We could. We could pick. Yeah, we could pick.
33:21
JP Newman
You couldn’t pick a more generic boring, right, exactly. And then I went to thrive FP. And the FP was a joke about an LLC. Like, thrive FP was a joke or an LP. And it was standard for. FP was for purpose, for profit. So it was that first moment, I think it just was starting to take synthesizing. John Mackey, Peter Diamantis, that TEDx conference of, like, I want to stand for conscious capitalism, meaning that all my stakeholders need to win. And the fact that I have apartments and that most of my residents are my tenants, our workforce, housing residents, meaning they’re earning between 25 and $75,000 a year. That is America’s working class. I don’t deal with homeless. I’m not in transition. I am dealing with 41 million Americans, the heartbeat of America, the ones who, like, keep all of us thriving.
34:06
JP Newman
And that aha. I think that was an aha moment of like, I have a responsibility here, not just to my investors, not just to a spreadsheet of earning a 16 or 20 irrhe, but I actually had a responsibility to make sure that what I was doing in my world was going to be accretive to the residents and not extractive to the residents. It was that simple, like, consciousness of like. Cause I saw how a lot of these people lived, especially my early days in Louisiana were pretty rough properties. Like, I’ve seen the heroin needles. I’ve seen gunshots. I’ve seen. I’ve seen it. I mean, I’ve seen everything. Bed bugs. I’ve seen. You name it. It can just go on and on. Because if you think about it, 20,000 apartments, the average person has 3.1 people per apartment.
34:51
JP Newman
If you’ve done 20,000 units, that’s so far. I’ve affected, call it 60,000 people just alone. That’s not even my nonprofit. So all of a sudden, how many products? And by the way, it’s not just 60,000 people going back to the world of our friends. Some people are trying to get 30 seconds of your attention or 60 seconds. What’s it cost? They live at my place. I have them 1214 hours a day. So how am I presenting to them? How’s my lobbies? You know, what are my queues? That this is home and not a place where just a landlord’s coming to pick up a check. Now, I am FP, which is also for profit, so I do have a responsibility also to my investors. So I’m not angel. It still takes. How do I, you know, expenses, rent. There’s no way.
35:32
JP Newman
If you’re a for profit, that’s just the way it is. But can you come into it with a different lens of consciousness, of making sure that your residents feel like they’re home? And by doing so, here’s what you actually wind up creating. You end up creating resident retention. So when residents stay longer, investors win.
35:50
Brad Weimert
Yeah.
35:51
JP Newman
So it, like. But, like, literally, I know this seems like, so basic, but you’d be surprised. This doesn’t happen very often. Well, my industry.
35:59
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I. Look, I don’t believe in altruism. I do not think that concept exists. I mean, I think that at the end of every chain of what people would deem to be an altruistic activity, at a minimum, is people doing something to make themselves feel good. And it is always a part of that exchange that kind of leads me into that thought process. But I also believe that when you do something good like that, the other part of it is that, as you said, the other people win, and it keeps the circle going. And I think that’s true in a lot of areas of business where it’s, like, doing the right thing is going to result in positive press, positive pr, happy customers, happy employees. And, yeah, you could do a slightly different version.
36:43
Brad Weimert
But you might piss off one person or two people in that exchange. And if the people in the exchange are your staff, your vendors, and your clients, you don’t want to piss any of those people off, you can avoid it. So if you can make a little bit less money on a transaction and everybody’s happy leaving it, that’s the thing that actually lifts the whole thing the next time you go through it.
37:03
JP Newman
Now, also, this goes back to creativity, I think. I do credit my Sony days for this is like, there was other things I wanted to do for the residents, but I couldn’t necessarily justify it in a for profit wrapper. I wanted to create free programs. I thought, like, how easy could it be? I mean, these are our residents. Why don’t we just take really good care of them so they stay long? And they also, it’s really expensive to turn an apartment. So if you think about it, somebody moves out in Texas to give you an example, over 50% of your residents move out in one year in what I’d call c and b class apartment. So imagine having this, and you think about it. So you have downtime, you have to repaint it, you have to re carpet it.
37:36
JP Newman
You pay a leasing commission, you got to get your staff. It’s anywhere. This process usually costs you in a good market, between five and 15,000 of emptiness. So if I can literally put a hit on that and get better at that, why wouldn’t you do that? So my idea was like, why don’t we create some free programs for the residents? Like, not just amenities are usually in my industry. The amenities are like sparkling pool, laundry. It’s kind of bullshit, to be honest. I mean, yeah, you have a sparkling pool. Everyone does. But what if you had free telemedicine? Like, what if you just gave them teladoc? What if you gave them tutoring for their kids in any language, digitally, they can just access free tutoring because you were providing that for them. But I realized it’d be harder to justify some of those expenses.
38:16
JP Newman
We did some environmental things as well. So I created a nonprofit. And so the nonprofit now provides free programs for workforce housing residents. For right now, I think we’re in about 8000 apartment units. So right now we’re affecting about 21,000 people, and I’m planning to grow that nationwide. I actually want to change our industry, that programs come with rent in a for profit model.
38:38
Brad Weimert
I love that.
38:38
JP Newman
But in the meanwhile. But this goes back to that journey of, like, literally creating. And what I found is that step one of creating is intention. I had to wake up. I was fast asleep. I was walking these buildings, doing the spreadsheet, just like everyone else. I wasn’t thinking necessarily about my. I was thinking about surviving, putting diapers on my kid, keeping my wife happy. I mean, and that’s. That’s fair. That’s survival, man. I was right. I was broke. I had to, like, literally crawl myself out. And my wife kept shopping at whole foods. And I’m like, you gotta ease up on whole foods, right? Like, in the early days, you know, all that stuff. So it’s hard when you’re in scarcity to really think that way. But what I learned through my journey is that when you get out of scarcity, it’s like.
39:16
JP Newman
And bringing creativity to everything that you do is. It’s amazing what you can create. From the story I told you about this bank thing that recently happened. We become magicians, but it starts one tool at a time. What happened for me was, I said, let’s experiment. Step one. Way. Before the nonprofit was, let’s put up a garden so they can. In one building, where I knew some people had little plants, I could see there was a lot of planting. Why don’t we try? We have all this extra lawn. This lawn’s doing nothing for us. Why don’t we provide a garden? And what I learned from the garden was that it kind of worked. People loved it. But without organization, the kids would throw their tomatoes at the wall. So we had tomatoes all over the walls. So, like. But again, that was step one.
40:00
JP Newman
And then it led to this, like, things of, like, it just keeps leaning on and on. And right now we have some of the largest institutional partners who have partnered with us on the nonprofit to implement the programs.
40:11
Brad Weimert
So what did it take for you personally to get to the place where that transaction, that. Where that transition happened?
40:19
JP Newman
Depression.
40:20
Brad Weimert
Oh, interesting.
40:21
JP Newman
I went through a massive depression. I was in a hole, and it was the craziest hole because I was making. My company was growing, I was making money, and there was a lot of stuff going on at home. I actually had. My mother in law was dying in my house of cancer, and I had two young kids. I don’t know. I think I was just going through. I was starting to make some money. I remember I bought my first fancy car, but everything was uncomfortable for me, and I think the depression was things that were going home again. Watching someone die in your house is pretty heavy. I wasn’t prepared for. I just didn’t have any preparation for that. But then I also think making money, it felt like a really shallow victory. Like, I didn’t know what to do with it.
41:00
JP Newman
Some of the days I’d come into my office, I shut my door, and I’d cry. I didn’t know I was crying about. I was just crying. I just was in so much. I couldn’t find the joy in anything for about a year or two.
41:11
Brad Weimert
But you had money at that point.
41:12
JP Newman
Here’s the funny. The money kept rolling in, like, our success. Like, I’m sitting here, like, you know, really going through a rough psychological time, and in the meanwhile, I’m on podcast. I’m, like, doing my, like, I was highly functional, but completely in a psychological hole.
41:26
Brad Weimert
Do you think that you could have gotten to the point of transition had you not become financially successful?
41:37
JP Newman
To be honest, probably not. I think the money was helpful, but what I was really craving. So I think it was a combination, quite frankly, of having money come in. And then I think being in that hole, I had to figure out how to get out of the hole. The hole lasted for a while. Again, I think a lot of what I told you, I think, like something in the Diamantis book, something about hearing John Mackey speak, because I think what it was, it’s like I had to find a purpose of. I had to find something. And it was actually the purpose that I believe took me out of the depression. Having a purpose that I wasn’t even achieving yet, but having, like, a notion of going towards something artistic, creative, meaningful, spiritually fulfilling, I think was what got me out of my hole.
42:16
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think for me, and I think this is probably true of other people, but for me, money was the purpose until I had it, and then there was a hole for other purpose. But the concern that I would, somebody in my life likes to say, die eating cat food because I never had a concern I would diet and cat food, but I did have a concern that I’d be on hamster wheel forever. So I think that initial thought of, hey, how do I get to a functional retirement? Not having to worry about money was the first step. And because it was this overwhelming feeling of I have to do it. And it was wrapped up in scarcity, it was wrapped up in the need for accomplishment and proving myself and ego and all these things that drove me.
43:08
Brad Weimert
And it also took the space that was required for me to focus on something bigger.
43:15
JP Newman
Yeah.
43:16
Brad Weimert
And for you, that was purpose. And when you say purpose, you mentioned conscious capitalism and John Mackey, is that the purpose? Can you define the purpose further?
43:28
JP Newman
Yeah, I think for me, I never dreamt of, because I wasn’t Tiger woods, that my date. I wind up being in a business that basically provides housing for workforce housing residents or lending money on, like, that wasn’t like, certainly the dream at four years old. But I think the purpose was, now that I’m here, you start to realize the plight of, you go through evictions, you hear all the stories, and you’re just like, well, for some reason I’m here. What can I do to effectuate workforce housing? In America, we spend so much time talking about homeless people or the homeless, but that’s actually numerically the workforce. The people who are dollar 500 away from an emergency they can’t afford is most. It’s a lot of America, not everyone. That’s a lot of them.
44:09
JP Newman
It’s a lot bigger than homeless or other problems that we have. It’s like people just getting by. The Uber driver who’s got a second job, who, if the car breaks or the transmission goes out. And I have a lot of family members in that situation right now. This isn’t like a theory. Like, I live this. I don’t think most of us live this. We see it in our friends, we see it in our families, ones who are just getting by. And again, one medical, one problem away. And I think that for some reason, I just decided creatively, like, how can I impact this in a way where, again, I’m a creative capitalist?
44:40
JP Newman
So, like, to your point, like, how do I do this in a for profit wrapper and use the money for good and hopefully to wake up my industry, that these people are not pieces of traffic. They’re not commodities. My product is not a phone. It’s not a hairpin. It’s workforce housing residents. It’s people. It’s residents providing housing for residents. And I think that it’s hard. It’s easy to commoditize everything. Everything becomes a spreadsheet. Like, how many people, how many pieces of traffic came in our door this week? That’s a very common thing to say. But, like, I think humanizing it. And then for me, this is going to sound strange, but I’ll tell you what I actually think it comes to.
45:16
JP Newman
It became, as I grew spiritually, like, we talk about this idea in Christianity, and I’m not christian, but it’s still an interesting idea. You know, love thy neighbor as thyself. We talk about, you know, strangers. And I’m thinking, gosh, you know, it’s so easy. You know, especially in Austin, Texas, you know, hey, bro, how you doing? You give your friends a big hug, and you go to your next cool burning man experience together, and you go with here, and you meet at this fancy restaurant. You’re having craft cocktails. But, like, what about this idea? If we really are loving, and if we really say we stand for love, which a lot of us in our community, like, seem to be very loving individuals, well, then it seems like, to me, it could be a real challenge.
45:54
JP Newman
Like, I don’t know that much about loving a stranger. Even loving a neighbor is easier, especially in my neighborhood. But, like, what about loving a stranger you have very little in common with? Like, what does that even mean, really? Like, let’s. Let’s cut the bullshit. Like, what does that mean? Could you feel and not think it, not to your point, not try to be altruistic, but could you really see someone, soul to soul, for who they are and know that you’re there for them, that you’re not just providing a service for your investors, but, like, you are fucking there for them? Really? And that’s still my ongoing spiritual challenge of this business now. So it’s taken on another purpose for me personally, which is love. Love a stranger as thyself. Like, can I really get to that point?
46:36
JP Newman
So that one of the motivations for the nonprofit, one of the motivations to continue doing this is actually the spiritual journey for me, of getting to the point, and I actually have a vision in my mind of what that looks like. But it’s a feeling. It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling and an emotion, and it’s curiosity, but I know it’s also a spiritual pursuit.
46:56
Brad Weimert
Wow. I tend to feel love for people that I don’t know when they’re in peril. And I think that seems to be. There seems to be something very human about that, where people help strangers when it’s clear that they’re hurting, but there seems to be an utter absence of it if they’re not exactly everywhere.
47:23
JP Newman
I call it the illusion of separation. Pick a team. We’re all on a team. Where the. Red, blue, are you red, are you blue? Are you this? Are you that? But it creates so much separation versus actually seeing each other.
47:35
Brad Weimert
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Where does that leave you now with the company? What’s the current sort of frame of the company? What does it look like? Give metrics around it. Volume, head count, where you’re going.
47:48
JP Newman
Yeah. So right now, by the way, I went from 20,000 units I’ve sold. I went, I’ll give myself a little credit. I sold 18,500 of those units.
47:58
Brad Weimert
Damn.
47:59
JP Newman
In the last five years.
48:00
Brad Weimert
Damn. Yeah. You told me that you were selling a couple big things.
48:03
JP Newman
I continue. I just sold them down to 1500 units, which is pretty low for me. It’s a badge of honor right now that we started early and were accused of being too conservative, being paranoid, and we made our investors great returns. We beat our business plans on a lot of them. I’m proud of that. But in a way, it’s an interesting moment because for two years I have not purchased a single piece of real estate. So it’s literally things have been off. I’m still managing a large fund and managing my 1500 units, but I’m at 14 employees right now, you know, keeping everyone there. I’m actually hiring right now to get ready for the next cycle. I’m ready to raise money in the next cycle, but there’s no evidence that I should be doing this right now.
48:48
JP Newman
My company’s revenues are down right now and you’re down to 1500 units.
48:52
Brad Weimert
Sure.
48:52
JP Newman
Your revenues are down 20,000. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, it’s like that instinct. It’s like kind of going back to like the time of like I’m a little insecure right now in a good way because I just haven’t raised money. It’s like going on a date after not being on a date for a bunch of times. Like going to go out there, putting kind of a team together. Also, as I told you, like doing this differently, not just doing the same thing. So like putting this, putting the processes, putting the even how I raise money is going to be very different in this model. It’s going to be a lot more fun for me, a lot more purpose driven.
49:25
JP Newman
The idea for me at this point is to be more like I joke and say, chief spiritual officer, really purpose, really talking about four dimensional wealth. Like, what is wealth like? I can help anyone I love. I can nerd out. If you want to talk about, if you want to show me your personal financial statement, you want to talk about cash flow or what to do with your money, I love doing that because I’ve done it so many times. I’ve helped people who have been kind of screwed or had a bad financial situation. And just again, I’m not a financial planner. I just happen to be pretty good at figuring because I just invest in so many things myself. And you’re a finance guy and I’m a finance guy.
49:59
Brad Weimert
So finance guys are moving quick and.
50:00
JP Newman
Looking at numbers I love that shit. To me, it’s like paint. It’s like painting a canvas. It’s just super fun for me at this point, but the idea at this point of it doesn’t matter. But I think since I’m a numbers guy, I could see maybe doing 25,000 more units. I could see managing five to $700 million, which is a really important number to me because I don’t want to become institutional. I love my time and my freedom. I also know at this point of my partner as well, we know how far we want to take this, and we also know where we want to stop. I think sometimes, like, as men or just in general, it’s easy just to keep growing and growing, but the vision is to keep it where it’s still like a boat. I call it boutique private equity.
50:42
JP Newman
At that point, we keep our mission. I think that we attract a certain crowd of unique individuals where we’ve always outperformed the market. So we’ll outperform the market. But I really want investors that really are attracted to that. They’re part of something that while their money is going there, it’s also going to a company that’s taking care of its residents and doing these programs and being more innovative. That’s interesting to me. So, like, if I get it my way in the next cycle, it’s pretty easy. I’m more doing this, like, what I’m doing here with you. Hopefully, mentorship has become a bigger part of my life. We’re kind of mentoring the next generation, and I find with so many people, they’re so stuck in their how or they’re so stuck in their head. This is like the most common thing I find.
51:22
JP Newman
It’s like, I’ll ask them, so, what’s your goal? My goal is to be worth 5 million. My goal is to be worth. It’s always a money, it’s a dollar amount. The next question will be like, what buys you? Like, what does 5 million buy you? And then they go into the story. It’s a narrative that they’ve been telling for so long in their head, but the narrative is so not connected to anything, emotionally or spiritually of what they want. There’s actually, for most people, there’s such a big disconnect. They’ve got a number, but they really don’t have that why deep enough. They think they have the why deep enough, but it doesn’t lead to purpose. And so I’ve been doing, between my podcast and mentoring people, that’s something that really turns me on.
51:56
JP Newman
I would love to use commercial real estate as my excuse to have conversations, like I’m having with you now, of how can we be these great capitalists, but put a lot of purpose and prove to people that capitalism is a force for good, and that doing good and doing well absolutely works together. I mean, I am as competitive as can be. I just don’t have to hurt someone. No one has to lose for me to be competitive. Nobody has to lose on the other side of that. I can be competitive for my investors, for the workforce, housing residents, for myself, by thinking more creatively, by structuring deals differently, but making sure that the other side doesn’t lose, I think is really important. I heard one more thing. Hope I’m not going too far off.
52:36
JP Newman
I heard this interesting thing from a perspective of when you die. This was a rabbi saying, the first question you’re going to be asked, if you believe that, you’re asked anything. But if you believe there’s pearly gates, the first question that you would be asked is, what.
52:55
Brad Weimert
Was it? A life well lived? What was your purpose?
52:58
JP Newman
You think so? But you know what? The rabbi told me? I thought this was a really interesting thing. How are you in business? Did you treat people well? Were you fair and did you treat people well? Because the rabbis, pastor wouldn’t have said that shit. This is a jewish perspective. I think the commentary was, how you act in your business is how you act in your life.
53:20
Brad Weimert
Yeah, 100%.
53:21
JP Newman
I think that was the point of it, is, like, how you treat people there. There’s no difference. And I think a lot of people treat business as a sport. Like, it’s okay to screw someone, because my job is to maximize efficiency or maximize return at any expense. And I don’t believe that to be the case. So I think what it looks like in the next phase is I get to hang out with you more. We get to do cool shit together, have a company that thrives. And the most important thing I always say to people is, like, you and I both cannot guarantee. Like, I can’t guarantee macroeconomics. I’ve had some losses in this cycle. It’s my first time.
53:54
JP Newman
It’s like, after a perfect average, now we’ve had some losses, and now it’s getting real, because I can’t affect macroeconomics when prices go down 20% to 40%. I mean, that’s nothing I can do with the Fed and $9 trillion of money that went in. So all we can control as business guys is how we treat people. Transparency, fiduciary, being the a team and doing the best we can. So when shit starts to go wrong, that we know we’re doing the best we can on behalf of our investors, and that’s all I can offer. But that’s my side of the equation, and I just think that’s really important going forward and not trying to over promise people. In fact, one of the things I’ve learned during the downturn is, and I really credit my partner for this, who talks to the investors are my clients.
54:40
JP Newman
More than we usually deliver bad news early and often, we do not wait. We don’t powder puff. We give a lot of communication. If you’re listening, and we don’t over scare them. There’s no reason to. But we just say it like it is. And I think that really, if I could give advice to anyone out there so much better than when you’re, like, a little afraid, that’s the time. Just. Just say it. Just get. If you think it’s relevant, clear it out. But just people much prefer. Because then you create this relationship of trust with people, and people can take. It’s surprising how well people can take bad news if it’s given to them with respect and trust and early where they don’t feel surprised from it. That’s been my experience of that, of the downturn.
55:26
Brad Weimert
I think you’re right. I think that it’s also back to the farce of altruism. I also think that it’s self serving. I think that when you give, when you have the difficult conversations, routinely, you feel better. You are letting go of stress, you are not ruminating, and you are moving through things. And when you’re holding onto that shit, you don’t have the space to solve another problem. It’s occupying something there. So we’re going into q four of 2024. What does real estate look like in the multifamily?
56:02
JP Newman
So right now, it’s really coming from Austin, Texas. There’s oversupply. We have these cycles, so everyone four and five years ago, and they thought the go days couldn’t, and they built too many units. So in Dallas, in Austin, almost everywhere in some of the key markets, particularly southern markets, were overbuilt. So for the first time, we’re actually seeing rents going down. Right now. Rents went up crazy, but when you have this much supply in the marketplace, the market soft. Right now, my rents have gone down about 15% this year. Not great, you know, not great. A lot of the multifamily looks like a business right now, where your expenses have gone way up between interest rates, insurance, taxes. So your expenses are way up and your revenue, ironically, is down. So it’s like you couldn’t. It’s a shitty time in a lot of ways.
56:48
JP Newman
And if you. Anyone who’s purchased anything in the last three or four years, like, most likely not always, but I’d say most likely they’re in a business that’s really having some net profit challenges based on what I said. So what has to happen? Prices have to go down so that you can create. Most people want to create cash flow from their businesses or profits, not losses. So my prediction is that we are in a hard time right now. Prices have gone down. I think prices have gone down more than people realize. I think residential, I think even in Austin, I think prices are down 20% right now. I can tell you multifamily in Texas is down between 20 and 45% right now. The reason why you don’t hear too much about this yet is because not a lot’s transacted. Because.
57:31
Brad Weimert
Hold on. You need to benchmark this because 20% to 40%. Since when?
57:35
JP Newman
I say in the last 24 months.
57:37
Brad Weimert
Well, right, but, like, that’s really important because you look at how much it grew in Austin.
57:42
JP Newman
Right.
57:43
Brad Weimert
In 2020 and 2021.
57:44
JP Newman
Right? We.
57:45
Brad Weimert
Yeah, we just went up too much, but we’re still way the fuck above where were in 2019.
57:51
JP Newman
Well, I can tell you, though, prices are just starting to, which is why I’m raising money right now. Again, prices are just hitting prices, actually, in Austin of almost five years ago or maybe even eight years ago. Like, prices have gone down. That’s what I’m saying. If you think about that, 40 or 45% is most of that. Is most of that fat? Yeah, I don’t know if it’s fat. It’s just the cycle. But we’re actually getting to prices that I haven’t seen in years.
58:14
Brad Weimert
Well, I mean, it’s a bigger conversation because it’s also zip code specific. So if you look at the center of downtown versus the different areas, and you look at the shifts and all those, they’re nuances, right. And you look at multifamily versus single family home, and you look at even inside of single family home kind of what product, you’re looking at what type of house.
58:35
JP Newman
Correct.
58:36
Brad Weimert
All that matters.
58:36
JP Newman
It does.
58:37
Brad Weimert
And I guess I just. I want to put an exclamation point on that, because when you. There’s so much spun news on the real estate, the condition of real estate in any given market, and you need to double click on it. Like you need to say, hey, what are you actually trying to do? What’s the point? And you know, the question of like, what’s the real estate market like now? Yeah, it’s like, well, fuck, man, what are you trying to do? What’s the point?
59:03
JP Newman
Totally. And I think that, again, if you look at your customers, if any business and demand housing still, we have a huge shortage. We have a huge shortage of housing. And so, and that’s going to be long term and that’s going to be like. And you look at the companies that are growing in, especially growth cities like here and other places, like the business is really good just right now. The fundamentals are off. It’s overpriced, in my opinion. Yet now you’re seeing institutions jumping back in. And here’s what the institutions were saying. When they look at crypto, when they look at the stock market, when they look at other equities, they still want to be in real estate.
59:37
JP Newman
The thing that’s troubling for me right now is that a lot of these institutions are already beginning to go off the lines and they’re starting to invest again. But they’re investing at prices still where you’re not producing cash flow like you’re doing it. They call it a basis play. So they’re buying because it’s because they’re buying below the cost to build it, which is called replacement cost. They feel like, again, and I think if you’re a teacher’s pension fund or a police pensions fund and you’re thinking ten years out, that’s maybe not a bad theory, because you just say, you know what I see the supply demand imbalance. I don’t even need to earn cash flow now. This is something new.
01:00:11
JP Newman
Usually in the past, if you’re investing in oil or stocks or real estate, you want to see some dividend, it may turn out in this next cycle that there’s no dividend or very little dividend. Where in the past, for example, I’d say in my career, the average dividend was six to 8% to the investor paid quarterly off of b class properties. That dividend may be gone or lowered because you’re going to have a lot of competition now that you’ve gotten. I mean, it used to be a mom and pop industry particularly, and now it’s become Blackrock and the big ones, and there’s so much money that I think that unfortunately you’re going to see either no or lower yields if you want to invest in real estate, you’re going to look at as a long term basis play.
01:00:56
JP Newman
And the reason why you’re going to do, you’re going to say, like, I’ve got crypto here, I’ve got stocks here, but I want to be in hard assets that are inflation resistant, go with markets and what have you.
01:01:06
Brad Weimert
I look at that. Similarly to big tech and venture capital will sink money in. Look, doing a series a, B, C, D, E is pretty fucking close to a Ponzi scheme a lot of the time.
01:01:26
JP Newman
I gotcha.
01:01:27
Brad Weimert
And so it’s like the, you know, the business isn’t making money. No, there’s no profit, and let’s just keep dumping money into it.
01:01:34
JP Newman
Let’s. Your a or b may get diluted. So whatever you think, you, whatever good deal you think you got could just be one crazy.
01:01:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah, but the bet is, and I’d say that there’s more volatility and way more risk. The bet is eventually we can see over a long enough time horizon, the macro picture works. And the same concept is what you’re saying with real estate, where it’s like, hey, look, we’re not concerned about the loss of cash flow in the next eight to ten years. We know that the numbers will work. Ten to 15, and it’ll be stable.
01:02:04
JP Newman
Yeah. And I actually, I’m bullish. I actually think it’s not eight to ten. I think it’s actually. I think I’m optimistic that in the next three to five year, we’re just going to continue going down the road, and I think we’re going to be just fine. I think the product will get absorbed, things will get a little more in balance. We do have an affordability issue, and there are lots of potential solutions for that even too. A lot of it, quite frankly, is we have to allow zoning. I know a lot of people don’t want their neighborhoods to become more dense, but part of it is density, part of its transportation. I don’t know if you and I will be flying in drones in the next five years from place to place.
01:02:39
Brad Weimert
Hope so.
01:02:40
JP Newman
I hope so too. I actually think it’s possible in the next five to ten years we will start to get off the ground a little bit. And I think that’s a game changer, because I think density solves your problem. Density creates opportunity for people to, you know, more people to live. Austin’s already did a very kind of a big deal where they’re allowing more density. Even in this beautiful neighbor, you’re in. Yeah, you know, the three things. That’s. These are all the things that are really going to help create really nice housing and affordable housing for people. And there’s no reason why you can’t make a profit and still provide great affordable housing. So that’s my thing.
01:03:11
Brad Weimert
I love it. Well, let me ask you a couple quick questions before we wrap here. So you’ve used the language. You don’t want to end up institutional, but you’re playing a big game and you’re raising money for investors to invest in real estate. I like to douche it myself because I’m afraid of losing control of things. And it’s not lost on me that. But that’s not my whole game. Right. At some point, you are investing in other people’s projects, or it behooves you to. It’s a lever for a 25 year old starting in real estate. What do you suggest they do?
01:03:45
JP Newman
Yeah, I think it actually is a personality because there’s people, I call it the lone wolfs. And you can make a lot of money just doing your own things. I know a lot of friends who made a lot of money doing that. I brought in a business partner. I have other partners. I like team complimentary things. So theoretically, I have to do more business to get to the same pie because I’ve got a team and staff and partners. But I love the way I’ve done this. Like, my partner is amazing. We’ve been together for almost 15 years now, and we just. We conquer and divide, and we do it so well together. But it’s like a relationship. It really is. It’s a lot of management. If you’re not that kind of person, likes to manage other people. Hard to find the right.
01:04:24
JP Newman
Just like it’s hard to find the right partner in life. It’s hard to find the right partner to. To partner with, where they don’t break your heart either. Steal your money, which happens a lot of times in business. So I think it really is a person, and managing people is a lot of work. I think when it’s a lot of, like, it’s a lot of work to manage people. Like, it’s. You gotta want to do this. It just fits my personality. So I don’t think there’s any right way. I think you kind of know who you are. If you know there is a big responsibility, I’d say it’s a bigger responsibility. Managing other people’s money, your own. What keeps me up at night is not necessarily about me. It’s about thinking about my investors.
01:05:02
JP Newman
And when that bank story I told you earlier, it’s like, that’s not my money. It is my money, too, actually. My money is in every deal, but it’s my money. But it’s a lot of investor money. So it is a pressure that some people don’t want to take on. It takes a lot of communication, a lot of work. So I would say, know who you are. Know thyself. When picking which direction you want to go.
01:05:25
Brad Weimert
What do you think the biggest mistake is that you’ve made along your path?
01:05:28
JP Newman
Sometimes out of fear of not wanting to be the guy who eats cat food, I’ve been too conservative. I think sometimes fear has gotten in way, in my judgment, of where I could do more. I don’t totally. Like, I could swing bigger in a lot of things, not just. Not just in real estate. I think even in, like, giving away philanthropy, I think there’s more there that sometimes I hold back. I think I hear a lot of people, and they’re tragic stories, and I’m like, I don’t want to be that statistic. And because of that, maybe I hold back more than I need to. I think it’s maybe held back might be a word. Maybe there’s some relationships I missed out on, some great friends that maybe I just kind of, like, was insured and put in the time. I’m sure there’s many.
01:06:16
JP Newman
There’s always deals. I’m sure my company could have even been. It’s been very successful, obviously, but it could have probably been twice as successful if I wanted it to be. And I’m not sure that really matters, but I’d like to think, as I. As I grow, that I’m doing things more from intuition and wisdom and less from fear. And that’s taking me a long time. I mean, I think that’s a lifelong process, but I think in my thirties and my forties, there was a lot of fear in the mix when I was making decisions.
01:06:41
Brad Weimert
Is intuition wisdom?
01:06:43
JP Newman
I think so. I think if you’re really in it, if you’re not in your ego, I think if you’re actually. If you’re hitting the sweet spot in meditation, you’re not just closing your eyes and you’re actually finding whatever your version of meditation is, if you’re finding some quietness, I think it’s our God given right to have that ability. I think that this idea that so much of frequency, vibration, intuition, whatever you want to call it, whatever lies beyond visible light, like that other 99%, that’s all we know. It’s real, just like your heart beats from electricity. We know all these things and I definitely think you can tap into that, but it takes some discipline to do it.
01:07:25
Brad Weimert
What do you think the biggest disruption in real estate is going to be in the next five to ten years? From a technical perspective or otherwise?
01:07:33
JP Newman
I think it’s going to continue to be institutionalized. So the person you’re renting your house from is going to be Blackrock. And I think they’re not going to care much. I think it’s going to be almost all completely automated. Bleak, unfortunately. I think that there’s just so much money. Money’s got become so concentrated at the top real estate, it’s obvious that it’s one of the most attractive places to go. So I do think this all, this whole thing gets more institutionalized. You don’t hand your check to your manager. I think it’s just not going to be that kind of relationship. You know what that’s worth. I think office is gonna be really interesting to watch how we work. I struggle at my company. I think a lot of people are struggling as owners. Like, what does this look like post Covid?
01:08:19
JP Newman
So what happens to those gorgeous office buildings? Do they become part time? Do you work twice a week, three times a week? I think everyone’s trying to figure it out. I’ve heard many things. So how we office and how we communicate is going to be changing, especially with AI. Like, I don’t think we’re going to become like, nothing to do, and we’re all going to be on universal basic income. I don’t see that happening. But what do we do and how do we commune? But I think being communal, I don’t think it ends. I don’t think we all just work from home. I don’t think that’s good for our mental health. And I don’t think having any job, I don’t see that just knowing how human beings are made.
01:08:56
JP Newman
I think the only thing, maybe this is more of a dream that I’d like to see out of real estate from the physical envelope itself is we’ve really crew made it, created homogenized, non walkable cities. Everything is about the car. And so when it’s expensive, and then you build 20 miles out, when that gets filled, you build 25 miles out. When that gets filled, you build 30 miles out. And having regional hubs, if that’s what we have to do, is take our farmland and convert it to keep affordability, I don’t know if that’s going to change.
01:09:23
JP Newman
It’s a hard pattern to change versus density, but this idea of having regional hubs, the domain is a regional hub now, having walkable, not just drivable, not going to best buy and not going to your restaurant, but my hope would be we can get more creative and creating regional hubs that feel like town centers, that are walkable. If you look at what is successful in real estate, the most successful projects right now almost. People want to be together. They want to sit outside. They do want to commune. And I think that. I don’t think you’d have ever imagined. I don’t know how many insurrected. Like, I use the domain here, which is just a local retail, but thousands of people live at that place. Why would you live in a retail center? Because people want to be close to each other.
01:10:05
JP Newman
The one more piece I’d like to see with it is some green. There’s no reason. As the planet’s getting hotter right now, and concrete’s, quite frankly, ugly, there’s no reason why we can’t get. I noticed this in Amsterdam. It’s so easy on our buildings to start creating, like, literally, like, vertical landscaping. Like, gorgeous vertical landscaping for CO2, for pollution, to cool things down, and for beauty. I’m seeing it. I’ve seen some of this in Costa Rica. I’ve seen some of this in Amsterdam. I don’t see enough of it here. And I’d love to see that in real estate going forward.
01:10:37
Brad Weimert
I love that. Awesome. JP, if people want to find out more about you.
01:10:42
JP Newman
Yeah.
01:10:42
Brad Weimert
You want to point them?
01:10:43
JP Newman
Yeah. So for my company, it is thrivefp.com, comma FP, like for purpose, for profit. My podcast is called Investing on Purpose. And you can find me at investing on purpose on all the main channels. The show talks a lot about how. It’s very much what we talked about today. It’s how purpose driven businesses can create outsized returns. And I interview some of the most interesting folks. In fact, I’m gonna try to recruit you next to be on my podcast. And that’s probably the best way to. The best way to find me from those channels.
01:11:13
Brad Weimert
That’s awesome. Well, next time will either be your podcast, but it will probably, before that, be just doing some fun shit somewhere.
01:11:20
JP Newman
I love it. I need to get you on the boat. We gotta get some surfing done.
01:11:22
Brad Weimert
Hell, yeah.
01:11:23
JP Newman
Let’s do it.
01:11:24
Brad Weimert
All right, man. Thank you so much.
01:11:25
JP Newman
Thank you so much.
01:11:27
Brad Weimert
I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself, beyondamillion.com, which has some cool free resources, including a free course. And we finally launched the beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe. And if you don’t want to, you still will probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out. YouTube.com eondamillion.
JP Newman
JP Newman is the founder, CEO, and managing principal of Thrive FP, a real estate investment firm specializing in the syndication and management of multifamily apartment communities. Thrive FP is built on the principles of conscious capitalism, aiming to deliver strong returns while creating positive impact for investors, residents, and employees alike.
JP began his career in the entertainment industry before transitioning to real estate, where he now focuses on building businesses that balance profitability with purpose.
Resources
[guest_info]
Imagine making a profit while also making a difference.
Many people believe that’s not possible, that these two things are mutually exclusive. But this mindset is holding back progress!
Today, Brad Weimert sits down with JP Newman, the founder, CEO, and managing principal of Thrive FP. Thrive FP is a real estate company specializing in the syndication and management of multifamily apartment units.
Thrive FP integrates the principles of conscious capitalism into its business model, ensuring that all stakeholders—investors, residents, and employees—benefit from their operations. This approach emphasizes both profitability and social responsibility.
Brad and JP discuss his transition from the entertainment industry to real estate and how to create businesses that make a profit and a difference.
Tune in!
Inspiring Quotes
- “How you act in your business is how you act in your life.” – JP Newman
- “If you lack the confidence to pursue, you never get off the starting line.” – Brad Weimert
- “It all came down to me. I had to learn to take all those setbacks, and I had to learn how to thrive from them.” – JP Newman
- “I don’t believe in altruism. I do not think that concept exists.” – Brad Weimert
- “The difference between those who execute and those who don’t is the willingness to push.” – Brad Weimert
- “Purpose took me out of my depression.” – JP Newman
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