Multifamily Syndication for Real Estate Agents: Lessons from Former Lender Vessi Kapoulian

Most real estate agents spend their careers helping other people build wealth through property. Far fewer have a clear picture of how the big apartment deals actually work: who runs them, how investors get paid, and what happens when the market turns. On Episode 226 of The REI Agent, host Mattias Clymer sat down with Vessi Kapoulian, a former commercial lender who managed over a billion dollars in commercial credit portfolios. Today she runs DBA Capital Group, with approximately $80 million in assets under management across Florida, Tennessee and Georgia. Her story starts behind the Iron Curtain and ends with some of the most candid talk about multifamily syndication you’ll hear from someone who has seen deals from both the lender’s desk and the investor’s chair.

Here’s what agents can take from the conversation, whether you’re buying your first rental or wondering whether passive apartment investing belongs in your long-term plan.

How does growing up behind the Iron Curtain shape an investor’s mindset?

Vessi grew up in Bulgaria at a time when, as she puts it, travel was almost impossible. Her mother made her a promise with no obvious way to keep it: if you learn English, I’ll send you abroad. By the time Vessi had learned it, the wall had fallen. Her first trip was to London, then Japan, and she knew she wanted to study abroad. Her family was poor, so the only route to a U.S. education was academics. She studied hard and came to the United States on a full scholarship.

Home ownership worked very differently too. When she was growing up, it was “virtually impossible to own a home because everything was owned by the government.” She still remembers the day her family bought their apartment through a lease-to-own program as “a historical day.” Even now, she explains, products like the 30-year fully amortizing fixed-rate mortgage don’t exist in most of Europe. Buyers in Bulgaria often pay cash, face high down payments, and inherit property across generations. In most places, people buy property to build wealth, not for cash flow.

For agents, this is a useful reframe. Low-down-payment loans, long fixed rates and properties that can produce both appreciation and income are unusual by world standards. Vessi’s background also left her with what she calls an abundance mindset: you may not start with much, but with clear goals and real work, “nothing is easy, but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.”

Why did a successful corporate lender start investing in real estate?

After school, Vessi followed the path held up as success in the early 2000s: join a large firm and climb the corporate ladder. She spent most of her career in commercial lending. Three events gradually changed her mind. The first was Enron and the second was the 2008–09 crisis. Each one left people with no jobs and decimated retirement accounts. The third was personal. Her employer went through repeated restructures, and one day she walked into her office, with no notice, to learn that 70% of her immediate team had been let go.

She was spared, but she doesn’t credit talent. “These are cost decisions,” she says, and the people who remained were expected to do double the work. That pushed her to ask a different question: what can I actually control? Not the markets, and not corporate restructures. What she could control was how she managed her retirement and her income streams. Because Bulgaria had no developed stock market when she was growing up, hard assets were what investing meant to her. Real estate was the natural choice.

This is a familiar story for many agents’ clients, and for many agents. The urge to build a safety net that doesn’t depend on any one employer, broker or market is often what drives someone to buy their first investment property.

How do you get past analysis paralysis on your first investment property?

Vessi’s first deal came from a simple habit: she showed up and followed up. She read heavily and went to local meetups. One presenter, who talked about investing out of state, ended every talk with “if you have questions, call me.” So she called. He ran a turnkey rental company, and her first property ended up in Memphis, Tennessee, a market she already knew from living in the South.

She admits that analytical people like herself are prone to analysis paralysis. What helped her was deciding to get started rather than waiting for a perfect deal. A standard 75% LTV loan wouldn’t have produced the cash flow she wanted, so she put more money down instead of passing on the deal. Two years later the property had appreciated. She refinanced while rates were still low, recovered her initial investment, and the property became what she calls an infinite cash-flow deal. She is careful to call the timing “pure luck.”

Her advice for agents and clients who freeze: work out what is actually holding you back. If there’s a real problem with the deal, find the two or three specific concerns and dig deeper, or pass. If the problem is fear, “the only way to overcome it is through action, not reckless action, but thoughtful, deliberate, inspired action.” Start small. She moved from a single-family home to a duplex, then an 11-unit, and now syndicates apartment deals of 150 units and more. Her last point matters for anyone who works with investors: the first property doesn’t have to be in your backyard, as long as you do your diligence and build a team you trust, including the agent, property manager, lender and insurance broker.

How do multifamily syndications work, and who are they right for?

Vessi calls real estate a team sport. As a portfolio grows, you need more time, more capital, or both. Syndications let investors pool both. On the active side are usually two to five general partners. They find the deal through local brokers, underwrite it, arrange financing, do the due diligence, run day-to-day operations and eventually sell. On the passive side are limited partners. Vessi describes them as typically busy, high-earning professionals who like real estate as an asset class but don’t have the time or desire to run it themselves.

The trade-off is control. Passive investors don’t manage the property, and they are also shielded from many liability issues. But because they give up control, Vessi says it is “extremely important to vet the operator.” So much of the risk comes down to how well the business plan is carried out. She is seeing it in today’s market: a great property can be run into the ground by poor operations, while a strong, well-capitalized operator can turn around a struggling one.

Mattias added why this suits agents in particular. Unlike a tech stock, you aren’t trying to understand an unfamiliar industry. You already understand rents, and if you know commercial real estate, you understand how cap rates drive value. He pointed out how much a modest rent increase across 150 units changes a property’s valuation. He also calls syndications the “realtor’s 401(k)”: you invest and leave it alone, and when a deal sells, you can roll the proceeds into the next one. He shared his own experience investing in a mobile home park syndication. He invested $50,000 and, through accelerated depreciation, wrote off roughly $66,000 in the first year. He urges full-time agents who may qualify as real estate professionals to talk with their accountant. As he notes, every deal is different, and this is not tax advice.

What should investors understand about preferred returns and liquidity?

Vessi points to two common misunderstandings. The first is about preferred returns. Most deals today offer one, but it is not guaranteed. Too many investors see a 7–8% preferred return and assume monthly cash flow at that rate. “That’s not necessarily always the case,” she says, “especially if the deal is not managed right, or if market forces intervene.” Cash flow is only as good as the assumptions behind the projections and the operator’s ability to deliver them.

The second is liquidity. Syndications typically hold properties for five to seven years, and you can’t call the sponsor and ask to be cashed out the way you’d sell a stock. Her rule is simple: plan on that money being locked up for the full hold, and “if you think you have to access it, don’t invest.”

She also made the case for scale with a story from her own single-family portfolio. She recently replaced just the condenser unit on an HVAC system for about $4,400, and it wiped out that property’s cash flow for the next six or seven months. In an apartment community, especially at 70 units or more, one or two units going dark is absorbed by the rest. Those are the economies of scale that make larger properties attractive to her.

What happened to the apartment market, and why does Vessi call the next decade “the decade of the operator”?

Vessi gave a plain walkthrough of the downturn. During COVID, record-low rates and migration into Sunbelt markets drove household formation and a wave of new development. In some Florida markets, she says, rents grew 20–30% a year for two or three years. Then in March 2022 the Fed began raising rates, roughly a dozen times before pausing, and rates effectively doubled. Higher borrowing costs, oversupply in many markets, flat or falling rents, and expense inflation that at one point reached 9–10% combined into what she calls “severe cash flow compression.”

Many operators had made it worse with high-leverage, variable-rate bridge loans, “letting the debt wag the deal,” as she puts it, because it was the only way for deals to pencil out. Those loans typically carry a three-year term plus two years of extensions. By her estimate, roughly $800–900 billion in loans is maturing, much of it already extended, and many lenders are now saying they’re done extending.

She doesn’t sugarcoat it. Multifamily is in its winter season. But she also sees a repricing the market had to go through, and she believes the next 24 months or so could be the best time to invest in apartments. From roughly 2011 to 2021, she says, falling cap rates bailed out even bad operators: “that was really the decade, I’ll call it, of the cap rates.” She doesn’t expect that to repeat. Rents will likely grow again, but not at the rates of the last cycle. Profit will come from growing net operating income through strong operations, or from buying at a very low basis. That’s why she calls the next ten years “the decade of the operator.”

What are Vessi’s golden nuggets for real estate agents?

Vessi left listeners with three principles drawn from her years as a lender and as a capital allocator.

1. Verify before you trust. She flips Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify”: check the numbers first and protect the downside. In her words:

“When investing in deals, one of the first questions I like to ask is how do I lose money on the deal?”

2. Remember Buffett’s rules. Rule number one: never lose money. Rule number two: don’t forget rule number one. Understanding the downside before you look at the upside is how you follow them.

3. Dream, believe, achieve. Her company’s name, DBA, stands for this. Dream big. Believe in yourself and surround yourself with positive, like-minded people. Then take “thoughtful and determined action,” because no goal or investment becomes real without it.

For reading, she recommends Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich for mindset, along with books on real estate accounting and tax strategy. Mattias added a practical tip: if your accountant doesn’t know what accelerated depreciation is and you’re a full-time real estate professional, find one who does, and consider a dedicated tax strategist.

The bottom line for agents

Vessi’s story connects two worlds agents often keep apart: the deals they close for clients and the wealth they build for themselves. Start small. Understand the downside before the upside. Vet the operator more carefully than the property. Only invest money you can leave untouched for five to seven years. Whether you stay with single-family rentals or move into passive syndications, the same discipline applies.

To learn more, you can find Vessi at dbacapitalgroup.com and masteringmultifamilyunderwriting.com. Her books Mastering Multifamily Underwriting and The Busy Professional’s Guide to Passive Apartment Investing are available on Amazon.

Listen to the full episode for the whole conversation, including Vessi’s view on why multifamily may be nearing the start of its next cycle. If you’re ready to turn relationships into a business that builds long-term wealth, explore the tools and coaching at REI Agent Advisor. It’s built for agents who want to grow their business and their own portfolio at the same time.

Full transcript: read the complete episode transcript on the episode page.