Michael Blank Apartment Building Investing Podcast

Click here for Episode 51: From $7 in His Pockets to a Successful Multifamily Syndicator >

Episode 27: From $7 in His Pockets to a Successful Multifamily Syndicator

Vinney “Smile” Chopra shares his amazing journey from arriving in this country from India with $7 in his pocket to building a $70M multifamily real estate empire. In this episode, we focus in particular on how he started his multifamily investing career and how he eventually raised $1.1M to do his first two deals.

After having graduated from George Washington University, Vinney became a mechanical engineer. He was fascinated by sales and marketing and sold encyclopedias and Bibles door-to-door. For several decades, he was a professional fundraiser for non-profit organizations. He started investing in single-family houses in the mid-eighties, but in 2007 he became passionate about multifamily investing. Since then, he’s done $125M worth of real estate transactions and currently controls over 1,400 units. Vinney’s middle name is “Smile” because that what he did a lot during our interview.

Here are the topics we cover on the podcast:

Why he decided to get started with real estate. Too much work! Couldn’t really scale.
His first venture into MF: hard! it took 12 months. It seemed impossible. He ended up closing a 14-unit and then a 109 unit just several weeks afterward, raised $1.1M.