Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Apurva Shah. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Apurva, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

This is a great question and we get asked this often. “Who is JAYS?” The managing partners for our firm is Jack Yen and Apurva Shah. We took the combination of both of our names and created JAYS (Jack, Apurva, Yen, Shah). Early on, we didn’t really know what to call our firm, but it’s worked out and we’ve loved the branding and support from the community to identify it within the real estate industry.

Apurva, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Apurva Shah! I’m a Co-Founder and Managing Partner at JAYS Investments, LLC. We’re a private equity real estate investment firm based out of Raleigh, NC. My journey in real estate started at a very young age. I was born and raised in New York, my dad who is also my role model, shared a lot of his experiences with me from engineering to building and developing office/commercial real estate. Growing up he’d take me around and show me the different projects he’d be working on and I saw that real estate has a way of changing the entire outlook of a community.

After graduating college, I moved down to Raleigh, NC to work in corporate as an Product Manager/Engineer and I wanted to continue to fuel my passion for real estate so, not having any money as a post-college kid, I started to leverage my corporate career in engineering to fuel the capital needed to start flipping single-family houses and wholesaling homes. This built up a capital stack for me which also allowed me to start doing single-family rentals. This is where I met my now business partner Jack Yen. We both were destined to do larger deals and built a much larger business where we can impact those around us, so we sold our entire single-family portfolio and went into investing into affordable housing.

We now invest in mobile home parks, multi-family apartment buildings, self-storage, and commercial real estate.

Our goal is to build a community in every property that we invest in and add value as we continue to build our real estate empire. The goal of JAYS Investments, LLC is not only to drive significant investment yields for our investors but also to give back by allocating resources to the communities we invest in.

Today, JAYS Investments, LLC manages and owns over $50MM in real estate and continues to grow within the Southeast.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Growing up and even becoming a professional in corporate the biggest lie I’ve heard and learned was to keep all your money in a savings account and build up a large savings for your retirement. Now, I definitely agree that you should always have a saved up nest egg, or rainy day fund, but I had to unlearn that if you want to earn more money, passively, it is not a good idea to keep it in a savings account. It takes money to make money which is one of the biggest learning lessons that I realized after being in the corporate world a few years. Sure it might be nice to continue to climb the corporate ladder, but what does this cost you? Time, freedom, etc. Absolutely nothing wrong with continuing to climb the corporate ladder, but it’s what you take with your earnings to continue to earn passive capital. I learned that investing your hard earned money will produce higher yields than continuing to keep your money in the bank account which ultimately loses value over time due to inflation.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

The other co-founder of JAYS Investments, LLC is Jack Yen. He’s a brilliant guy that’s able to dissect numbers and evaluate opportunities at a deeper level which so many of us miss in the industry. Early on before we started JAYS Investments, LLC, I was scouting and evaluating multi-family/commercial deals to supplement my residential portfolio, and the ultimate goal was to continue to build the portfolio with larger deals. There was this one apartment complex that I was evaluating and felt was an incredible deal, but didn’t have the capital to take it down so wanted to reach out to meet other individuals who wanted to get into the space. I met Jack through Connected Investors and asked to get coffee at Starbucks to evaluate the deal with him. Ultimately, he passed on the deal, but we both realized that we have a similar mentality on how we want to build a long lasting real estate company while adding to the portfolio conservatively. Since we’ve met, we’ve taken down over $50MM in real estate and been able to build a successful private equity real estate group. We look forward to where the future takes us together!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jaysinvestments.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apurva.shah92/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/apurva.shah.9279
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apurva-shah-15794271/