Season 3 of the No Cap podcast continues with a guest who’s turned heads in multifamily investing. Jack Stone and Alex Gornik sit down with Janet LePage, co-founder and CEO of Western Wealth Capital—a firm rooted in Phoenix with over $4B in transactions and 30,000 units under its belt.
But before the buildings came the binder. Janet takes us back to her first real estate education—a Trump University weekend, a $16,000 coaching program, and a cold call to a credit union VP that helped her close her first 23-unit deal while pregnant and broke.
Conversation Highlights
Alex: You started in coding?
Janet: I have a double major in computer science and business. I was a coder before I ever touched real estate. And I still geek out—my team was shocked when I reviewed a Python script one of them ran on Excel files.
Jack: So what got you into real estate?
Janet: I bought my first house at 23. A couple of years later, I got my appraisal notice and called my mom like, “Wait, the value went up?” I had no idea. That’s what kicked it off. Then I went to this Trump weekend seminar—yes, that one—and paid for a coach. That coach told me I was the only one who actually did something with it.
Janet spent a year flipping houses—56 homes in two years—while working full-time and raising two kids under two. Her days included crawling through doggy doors, building systems in Excel, and flying to Phoenix to buy homes at auction.
Janet: I remember presenting a PowerPoint to my dad to get $10K for my first flip. He charged me 18% interest. I flipped it, made $18K in 28 days, and never looked back.
Her first multifamily deal came in 2011—23 units in Tempe, Arizona. She didn’t have the cash, so she cold-called the VP of a small credit union at night and asked him to pull it from the auction.
Repeatability creates scalability.
Janet: I told him this would change my life. He pulled it. I bought it. I was 26 days from giving birth, eating a pickle and cheese sandwich in Birkenstocks in my tiny kitchen, and I remember thinking: this is the richest I’ve ever felt.
Alex: How’d you go from that to Western Wealth Capital?
Janet: The systems. I had a checklist. I flipped a 192-unit property next. Then another. I launched WWC with a partner, and our first deal was $10M—we needed to raise $2.8M. It felt impossible. But we figured it out.
By 2016, Janet was the third-largest multifamily owner in Phoenix. In 2018, she took the company institutional.
Jack: How’d you scale so fast?
Janet: Systems. By then we had an 83-point checklist. When we close on a building, the paint’s already picked, the pool furniture’s on order, the flowers are going in the same day. If we close before 2 p.m., the reno starts that afternoon.
Alex: No way.
Janet: We once started a reno before the deed was recorded. The seller called the cops.
Jack: What about today’s market? Rates? Debt?
Janet: It’s painful. But there’s opportunity. In 2021, we were mostly on bridge debt—30-month hold periods, value-add plays. We slowed down in late 2021. Underwrote 218 deals, bought 12. That saved us. But now, if you’re not already raising capital for the next deal, you’re late.
She says some of her toughest decisions involved walking away early.
If you only have 6 months of cash left, you’re already too late.
Janet: We sold some assets short. But today, they’re worth even less. The NOI held up. The expenses didn’t. And we had to be real with investors.
Alex: Are you seeing deals again?
Janet: Just tied up our first one in three years. 43% below replacement cost. Needs to be 55% occupied to break even. And it’s cash-flowing. I haven’t seen a deal like this since 2016.
Jack: So what’s the move?
Janet: Control what you can. Have your systems in place. Stay in your markets. And remember—if you only have 6 months of cash left, you’re already too late.
It’s the kind of discipline that helped her thrive in Phoenix, where knowing the submarkets block by block gave her an edge when others pulled back.
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