Former NFL linebacker Brandon Copeland joisn TheStreet to explain how he went from playing football to playing the real estate market.
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00:00So you boast an impressive real estate portfolio, right?
00:03So walk us through your financial journey.
00:05How did you get started?
00:09Yeah, so one, for me, I was extremely fortunate.
00:12We talk about it in the book as well, too.
00:14I was extremely blessed to play for a coach.
00:17His name is Biff Poggi.
00:19He's now the head coach at University of Charlotte, UNC Charlotte.
00:23And he actually ran his own hedge fund.
00:26It's now evolved into a family office in Baltimore.
00:29And I ended up asking him for an internship in the summers.
00:33And when I did that, that was my first time ever seeing Bloomberg terminals
00:37and watching CNBC and seeing stock tickers and things like that.
00:41And so it walked me into a world of like, oh, wow, you can make money
00:46and you can actually be sitting behind a desk and managing and delegating.
00:50When I come from a situation where it was you put on your uniform
00:54and you go into the office to make money, so to speak,
00:58and you go to work, you roll up your sleeves.
01:00And so for me, that was eye opening.
01:04And then over time, I went to the University of Pennsylvania,
01:07Wharton School of Business, interned on Wall Street, UBS for a couple of summers.
01:11Also came into the NFL and would still take internships at hedge funds
01:17and things of that nature in the offseason.
01:19And the goal was to just learn as much as possible.
01:22And in 2013, you speak about my investment journey.
01:25In 2013, my rookie year, I was with the Baltimore Ravens and the Tennessee Titans,
01:29and I was day trading during that season.
01:32And I was doing extremely well in my account,
01:35playing with house money at a certain extent.
01:38And then at the end of the year in December,
01:40I decided to take one big swing trade and hoped that the luck I had in the past
01:46would just play into this trade and I'd make more money in that time
01:49on this one trade than I had made thus far.
01:52And what happened was the entire market went down two days later
01:57because of geopolitical tensions happening over in Greece.
02:00And at that moment in time, the whole trade was wiped out.
02:04It was an options call trade.
02:06The majority of it was wiped out, the majority of the value.
02:09And that's when I started saying, hey, I have no control over this.
02:13Let me figure out something else that I have more control over.
02:17And I don't want to lose money.
02:20But if I lose money, I'd much rather be able to look in the mirror and say,
02:24hey, I made all these decisions.
02:25I'd still make them again, and I still lost money.
02:27And that's OK.
02:28It's more on me, more in my hands.
02:30And so that's when I started diving into real estate.
02:33I was researching it for a couple of years,
02:36started doing single family flips in Detroit with the Lions when I was with the Lions.
02:40So I would do that on the side.
02:42And again, being around some great mentors who showed me multifamily properties.
02:47They showed me houses where they were knocking off the roofs
02:50and adding a whole second level onto the houses.
02:53And these were all former NFL players.
02:56Right.
02:56It made me feel like, oh, I can do this, too.
02:58They welcomed me into the fold.
03:00And now we've evolved our portfolio to the extent where we're doing multifamily projects
03:07across the country.
03:08We've got, you know, 88.
03:10I just went to check on a property in California.
03:13We're doing doing a first beachfront property,
03:15multifamily, extremely excited about that.
03:18We're doing land development now.
03:19We got acres, hundreds of hundreds of acres with other NFL players where,
03:25you know, you got companies like Home Depot and Lowe's trying to bid for their spot on the land
03:31and Starbucks and Target and Walmart and all those things.
03:34And so it's just been an incredible maturation.
03:38But I'd say to, you know, double down or double back for your question.
03:42I'm just extremely curious about things.
03:45And I ask a lot of questions and I don't put limits on myself of what I can and cannot do.
03:51And I've been extremely blessed to have an amazing team and also amazing people around
03:55me that will welcome me into the fold to learn.
03:59And then I've been strong minded about getting an opportunity to own as much as I possibly can.