This Thrill-Seeking Billionaire Made A Fortune In Luxury Apartments

[Music] when we started we said who are we and what do we believe we're good at we' done a bit of real estate investing but our real strength our real Forte was as business owner so we said we're going to focus on apartments because they act like an operating business we were going to pay absolutely no attention to what the industry was doing you know people talk about well I tore up the rule book we never actually even picked the rule book up and so we built all of our own systems processes strategies and beliefs we quickly found out that what we were doing was radically different than the industry I'm Larry Connor and I'm the managing partner of the Connor group Larry Connor is a real estate investor based in Dayton Ohio his transactional approach to real estate investing at his firm the Connor group group has made him a billionaire worth an estimated $2 billion a self-described c student in high school Connor went on to become an entrepreneur who built one of the best performing real estate funds in the country there are certain personality traits that are common to most entrepreneurs I mean you got to have what we call grip passion and perseverance some people wear the moniker of entrepreneur but they're not they're people like want to be entrepreneurs to be a real entrepreneur is exceptionally hard to do the son of a World War II vet father and a Red Cross volunteer mother he went to high school in Dayton and graduated with a 2.0 GPA painting houses on the side with a friend after graduation he started buying used cars and packing them with damaged label Wines in Dayton selling them on for a profit to college students in Athens where he attended Ohio University on weekends he'd pick up dead bodies and bring them to a local funeral home for $5 a piece after school came a sales gig at a Volkswagen dealership followed by a stint as a travel adviser which took him to Morocco Mexico and Europe I had an opportunity to be exposed to a lot of I guess today what you call sea level Executives and you kind of got to see both sides some immensely talented and other people that I wondered how they ever got in that position and then by the time he was 27 he went back to Dayton to start his own business here in Dayton there was a new historical district called the Oregon district and I and a partner thought that we could start a bar restaurant and so we took an old movie theater converted it by the way we had no money and no experience and we went out and got 21 investors we raised a grand total of $52,500 we started it called nukem's Tavern it was phenomenally successful we sold it two years later and the investors got a 300% return He took the proceeds and bought and sold homes in Dayton then in the 1980s he moved to Orlando setting up a company that reportedly was once the second largest reseller of IBM microcomputers in Florida but the success didn't last and the firm shut its doors in 1990 I'm age 40 I'm broke I have a wife two kids and a farm actually the problem is I'm worse than broke because I had borrowed $900,000 on what they call Signature Loans well even though I was broke I was bound and determine I was going to pay every dime back I just thought that was the right thing to do if you said did you have a plan no but I had a commitment to do it anyway 3 years later through a lot of hard work dedication and a bit of luck I ended up paying back every one of the lenders he turned again to real estate recruiting two partners and a single investor to form the Connor Murphy and Burman Group which invested in apartment buildings there were three apartment communities in Dayton that had gone back to this Kansas City Savings loan through a foreclosure we started negotiating with them it went on for well I don't remember six months we were getting ready to close we called them on a Friday the government had come in that morning and seized the SNL we were back to Ground Zero starting over that's not good when you're trying to do your first Acquisitions we just didn't know how to quit so literally almost a year after that to the day we bought those three apartment communities and we actually bought them at a million dollar less than we had agreed to pay yet the operations had improved and so that was the launching pad and those three apartment communities turned out to be huge successes 10 years later he bought out his partners and took over the firm Connor seeks quick returns in an illiquid Market trying to profitably sell properties as quickly as possible constantly analyzing each one to juice income and minimize costs on average the firm keeps a property for 5 and 1/2 years you've got to be willing to take calculated risk not stupid risk you know you got to be an achiever but you also have to have some understanding and appreciation that people really matter and that you can't do it alone and that you got to build you know the right group of people we tried to hire some people from the industry in the first two years it never worked out so by strategy we built a business all with people have never done it before and it was one of the smartest things we did CU we're not encumbered by industry or conventional thinking the Conor group currently owns and operates a $5 billion portfolio of 51 apartment buildings across 12 States from Colorado to Florida since it was founded in 1991 its investments in luxury apartments have generated an annual rate of return of 30.4% many of those buildings were sold Less Than 3 years after they were acquired with returns ranging from 17 to 159% that risk isn't limited to his Investments Connor's personal Adventures include skydiving out of an air balloon at a record-breaking 30 8,139 ft a pioneering plunge to the bottom of the Mariana Trench at 35,8 56 ft below sea level and admission to the International Space Station as one of the world's first private astronauts there's never been a private crew that's ever gone to the International Space Station we were the first the 10 months of almost full-time training extremely difficult and humbling just keep in mind all the NASA astronauts Mega talented all have advanced stem degrees I have none of the above we did not good but groundbreaking research across 25 plus different experiments there have been few weeks in the history of the International Space Station that that much research was conducted in that compressed period of time so immensely proud of the ax1 team yes I would go again yes I may go again his ambition extends to philanthropy as well there's huge turmoil in March of 2020 we thought for a multitude of reasons we had both the obligation and the opportunity to stay engaged to keep operating but with that became a huge responsibility to take not good but phenomenal care of the people who are going to get us there which is all the associates especially the people at the front lines early in the pandemic in 2020 Connor invested in a handful of stocks and the investment gained 1.6 million in 10 days I felt great but a little bit wrong about hey that's great you did that but you know look at all these other people are out there suffering or working or things like that so I called then the director of communications Ryan hers I was leaving the office and he called and I picked up and I said what's going on and he said uh you know how I recently made some of those trades that we had talked about on on the stock market and and made that money 1.6 million he said what would you think if uh if we just gave it to all like Frontline workers any employee who does two things works here for the next six months and does a good job on their job we're going to take that 1.6 million and spread it out over roughly I think 400 Associates we had at the time and I said you know this is why I love working here because you do crazy like this I think that I think that you should sleep on it and let's talk in the morning but I love the idea in April of 2020 Larry brought casted a video message to his employees to share the news I'm taking the entire 1.6 million and dividing up amongst all of you why in my view this is not a gift you've earned it oh my God so again I want to thank each and every one of you for staying in the game and doing your part it really show showed he put his money where his mouth is like people count and I don't think he could have picked a better way to show us how we counted like it's not everything but just that gesture like it meant a lot especially during that time for a lot of people people were wildly appreciative people did a phenomenal job and so in my mind you just in invested in the most important thing you can invest in and that's it people the Connor group has a nonprofit arm called kids and Community Partners which includes the greater Dayton school and it recently opened the doors of its new location in Dayton it takes a tremendous amount of people to try to do the impossible which is what we're trying to do here and and so the hope is and the belief is is that we can build a revolution model that can transform kids lives kids who are under resource we believe that if we equip these kids not only academics but the total person what we call all the wraparound services that these kids can do as well if not better than any other child from any other environment we know from from research that if you're able to teach individually and at a child's own pace they can grow from the 10th percentile to the 76th percentile in one year which is unheard of we saw you know upwards of 20% growth in our students because we teach this way it's not easy but it's it's super impactful and that's just on the academic side we had last year 96% of our kids passed the Presidential Fitness Test and that's super important to us we had 98% of our kids get preventative care so they're annual doctor's visits two dental cleanings it's unlike anything that I could have imagined that I would have as a principal in terms of the the resources that we can provide our students our gut is telling us that this thing works and the early data is telling us this thing works we really started looking at it more like nonprofit activist investing as opposed to philanthropy or charity or just writing checks how are we really going to you know make a difference and and you know help pull people out of generational poverty I've seen kids in the public school system slip through the cracks because of the lack of resources that our country provides kids from under resourced areas to have the resources to really give our students what they deserve what every kid deserves it hits home it's great that we did this in Dayton Ohio but it's just one city this is a national crisis but also a national opportunity that it would be a shame we didn't take advantage of it the kids are a future of America we need to give them the opportunities right no matter what is involved in Connor runs a tight ship at the Connor group every employee is rated on a 10-point scale where a seven equates to a CGR the reality is this place is not for most people but it's a phenomenal place for the right person I tell people all the time he he's he's not an easy person to work for but it's never not interesting and he really at his core likes to help people I mean he really really does his Baseline motivation for doing this stuff is not headlines it's not financially driven I mean there's so many things that that he does for people that never make it out of this building or that never make it out of his office that he just enjoys doing there's a much higher standard than being finan Ally successful period everybody knows what the right thing is some people just choose not to follow it well that doesn't work for us and we don't care who you are to us it's never been about sizing it's always been about Excellence we will sacrifice sizing success financial gain for excellence [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Forbes

Views: 137,339

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Investing, Personal Finance, real estate, billionaire, larry connor, dayton, ohio, contrarian, the greater dayton school, axiom

Id: 8_K2Yq5hriQ

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2024