Shaan’s brother-in-law Sanjie Chopra tells the story of going from $0 to $1.5 billion in real estate in 10 years — with no outside investors. He started as a broker, got burned by a Jack in the Box operator and found himself $15 million in debt, bought a gym from a guy he met at 2am working out, built it to 82 stores (the largest private gym chain in California), then used the cash and a double escrow strategy to break into real estate development. He now focuses on retail shopping centers and targets 25-30% annual IRR. The episode covers his business philosophies, referral tactics from the gym days, experiential retail trends, and the “three-legged table” framework for living a balanced life.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sanjie Chopra (guest, real estate developer)
Intro: $0 to $1.5 Billion [00:00:00]
Shaan: Ten years ago, this guy owned zero dollars of real estate. Today he’s got a portfolio of about a billion and a half. He did that with no outside investors — just starting from scratch, one property after another, flipping, compounding, until he built a billion-dollar portfolio.
He’s also my brother-in-law. I’ve been asking him to come on the podcast for a while. He likes to keep a low profile, but he finally agreed. The story is a little crazy. He starts as a broker, makes a few million doing deals, then gets caught holding the bag when a client leaves him with $15 million in debt. Instead of declaring bankruptcy, he decides to pay it all back piece by piece. He does. And he ends up with a billion-dollar real estate portfolio using a very specific strategy.
This is Sanjie — the Rhino of Real Estate.
Shaan: Alright, my brother. You’ve got about a billion and a half in total real estate assets today, built over roughly the last decade. Where did it start?
Sanjie: I went to law school, did an MBA. I was fully set on being a lawyer. I was working for Mark Geragos out of LA on the Scott Peterson case — very intriguing, criminal law. But when I met my wife, she was against it. We’d talked about how I’d work for a lawyer five years and then get into real estate. She said, “Why do you need five years? Why don’t you just do it now?” I didn’t have a good answer. So I opened a real estate broker’s office.
I went back to my hometown, Modesto. Small office, a phone, started calling people. My first big sale: I needed to grow my office, called an older couple, said “If I lease your building, will you let me sell it?” They said yes. I sold it fast and made $60,000. That was my first win.
The Jack in the Box Disaster [00:07:00]
Shaan: So after a few years as a broker, things were going well. You were in your mid-twenties, making millions — unusual for a broker at that age. Then what happened?
Sanjie: I fell into a relationship with a Jack in the Box operator. This person was the first I’d ever call a mentor — almost a father figure. I drank the Kool-Aid hard. I was doing development work: find the property, secure the tenant, bring in a developer, take the buy-sell-lease commission on all three. Eventually I started managing their construction process too.
That was going really well until he stopped paying payroll taxes and got into serious trouble. Three days before we were supposed to close a deal where I was going to make my first $10 million in commissions — not just my first million, my first $10 million — the deal collapsed.
We had bought properties on spec thinking this guy was good for it. He was the largest Jack in the Box franchisee in Sacramento. I had borrowed $15 million from private lenders — banks wouldn’t touch me since I was 1099 — and I was looking at that spreadsheet every night thinking, “Let’s go.” I didn’t fully understand the risk at the time.
Three days before closing, he stops answering his phone. Ten deals. $15 million in debt. Just like that.
Shaan: You moved back into your childhood bedroom at some point.
Sanjie: Yeah. My wife went from being a passenger in a Range Rover to becoming a Zumba instructor at the gym we’d later buy — teaching 30-40 classes a week. We sold the car, sold the house, moved back into my childhood room. First night back, we turn off the light and the whole ceiling lights up — we’d had those glow-in-the-dark sticker stars up there since I was a kid. We both just start laughing. And I told her: give me nine months. I’ll figure it out. She was a ride-or-die from the start — she even pawned her wedding ring so we’d have the down payment to buy our first gym.
Buying the Gym at 2am [00:17:00]
Shaan: How did the gym come about?
Sanjie: I was in a terrible spot emotionally. My wife told me to go to the gym — I always worked out late at night. There’d be two or three guys in there at 2am. Nobody asks what you do in a gym. This one guy I’d work out with for months — I had no idea who he was. One day I walk in during the day and he’s behind the front desk. I go, “What are you doing there?” He says, “Come to my office.” Turns out he owns the place.
He says, “I’m trying to sell this gym. It nets $30,000 a month. I have a tax bill and I don’t want cash up front — pay me in installments.”
I was fascinated by fitness as a kid. I had been a trainer in college. I went home, told my wife: “I want to buy the gym we work out at.” She laughed. Thirty days later, we bought it.
First month, I go to the bookkeeper: “Where’s my $30,000 check?” She says, “Actually, you need to write a check for $22,000.” The previous owner had showed me the numbers the way he saw them — cash basis, trimmed down. The actual picture was different. And I was 28 years old in 2008 and didn’t fully understand the difference between cash and accrual accounting.
Shaan: And you’re still on the hook for the Jack in the Box situation this whole time.
Sanjie: The whole time. And I had a deed restriction on the properties — recorded it before closing, which was a mistake. It meant I couldn’t easily get out of them. The only way forward was to grind.
Building to 82 Stores [00:28:00]
Shaan: You ended up building the largest private gym chain in California. Walk me through how.
Sanjie: The first gym was Gold’s Gym. We turned it around over about a year. Then we opened a second. The referral mechanism we built was key.
My COO John and I sat in a room asking: what would make a member want to refer someone? John said, “Give it to them for free.” We said yes.
Here’s how it worked: a $39.99 membership, but we’d tell every new member, “You can get it for free. Just refer friends. For every person who joins with your name, we take a dollar off your dues.” People would ask for 40 passes because they’re paying $40. Members who referred enough people would get to zero. Then two of their referrals cancel — now they’re paying two bucks and they start calling their friends asking what happened.
It created this incredible motivation. Even a dollar was enough to make people hustle. We watched it happen.
Shaan: What else did you figure out along the way?
Sanjie: Location intelligence. Chipotle spends tens of millions a year figuring out the best real estate. We figured out: just open next to Chipotle. They’ve already done the work. And if you knew how to read the receipt codes, you could tell how many customers a given Chipotle location was doing — which told you which shopping centers had the most traffic.
We also learned what not to build. We put pools in some gyms early on. A pool takes 6,000 to 10,000 square feet. You’ll have four people in it at any given time. That’s a lot of footage for four people. We stopped building pools.
We started as Gold’s Gym operators, but we were watching Planet Fitness sign up 15,000 people at low prices. They served pizza and bagels — we didn’t understand why at first. Now we do: people come eat pizza twice a month, get their $9.99 worth, and never cancel. We eventually combined the best of Gold’s Gym, OrangeTheory, and Planet Fitness into a high-volume, low-price model with classes and group training. That worked.
By 2015 we had 33 stores. Eventually we grew to 82. We were the largest private gym operator in Northern California — close to 2,000 employees.
Shaan: You ended up filing Chapter 11 at some point.
Sanjie: Yes. There was a moment around 2011 with a property where I’d been paying a private lender for three years at 13% interest. I went to them — I went to high school with his granddaughter — and offered $50,000 to rewrite the note, lower my rate, give me more time. They said bring a cashier’s check tomorrow. “You don’t trust us, Chopra? You need a lawyer?” And I didn’t get a lawyer. Two weeks later I got a foreclosure notice. They decided the property was worth $4 million and they wanted it back.
We ended up reorganizing through Chapter 11. We paid every secured creditor 100 cents on the dollar — all $15 million, with interest. That relationship with those lenders is still intact today. I can call them and they’ll do a deal with me without needing much documentation. How you act on a loss defines the relationship.
The Double Escrow Strategy [00:43:00]
Shaan: So how did you make the jump from gym operator to real estate developer?
Sanjie: By 2015, we had built up the gyms but had no real estate. I’d sold the house, sold the cars. We were a gym operator. I wanted to get back into real estate but didn’t have seed capital.
I looked through what we had and remembered: we had an option on the second gym location in Oakdale — an option to buy the building at a defined price within a defined window. A broker approached us about that property. They didn’t know we didn’t own it. They said, “Would you sell it?” We had optioned it at about $3-4 million. We sold it at $7 million.
Shaan: Explain the mechanics for someone who’s never done this.
Sanjie: In our lease we put an option clause — essentially the right to buy the property at a specific price within a specific timeframe. We just have to notify the seller and have 60-90 days to close. So we already had a buyer lined up before we exercised the option. Same day we bought it, we sold it. We never had to take the money out of our own pocket. We pocketed the spread.
Shaan: Double escrow. We’ve talked about this a lot. You do it constantly. You agree to buy something but before you have to close, you sell it — same day the money comes in, you route it through, pocket the profit.
Sanjie: Beautiful when it works. Not completely risk-free — if the buyer blows out, you’re on the hook for something you can’t afford. But when you’ve done your homework and you know there’s a buyer, it’s a very capital-efficient way to build.
That first gym option made us several million dollars. That was the seed money to start buying real estate.
Retail Shopping Centers [00:55:00]
Shaan: You eventually settled on retail shopping centers as your focus. From the outside — as a tech guy in Silicon Valley — this always seemed random to me. Retail’s dying, right? That’s been the headline for 15 years.
Sanjie: That headline actually helped us. After 2010, all the capital in the market went to multifamily, storage, industrial — because everyone said retail was dying. So nobody built new retail shopping centers for years. Supply dropped. Demand stayed consistent. Now retail vacancy is under 10% nationwide — some of the tightest it’s been in decades.
The retailers that survived adapted. The ones that didn’t — Big Lots, Jo-Ann’s — they took on private equity debt and never adapted their model to be both a physical store and a distribution point. Best Buy ships from stores. That’s the model. Retailers that adapted are crushing it.
Shaan: What’s actually thriving in retail right now?
Sanjie: Experiential retail. Pickleball courts, trampoline parks, fitness concepts — tenants that drive foot traffic you can’t replicate online. Ross Dress for Less, Burlington, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods — they’re treasure hunts. The experience is the point. You can’t replicate “I walked in and found this random thing for 60% off” on Amazon.
And food. You can DoorDash anything, but people still want to sit down and eat. Ghost kitchens were tested — DoorDash tried it, closed most of them. The kitchen experience matters. People want to choose in person.
We’re also seeing new uses: lawyers, insurance offices, doctors — they’re going where the foot traffic is. EV charging is a huge value-add. You plug in, you have 20 minutes. You go do something in the center. That’s traffic we generate for our tenants.
Shaan: What’s your return target?
Sanjie: We target 25-30% IRR annually for our investors. To hit that, you have to actually go do something — add a tenant, break up the center and sell in pieces, do construction work. We’re value-add developers. We go in with a game plan.
The Philosophy Behind the Build [01:05:00]
Shaan: You mentioned a story to me once about a grocery store anchor tenant. You bought a center at a discount because the anchor had a short time left on their lease. Walk me through the thinking.
Sanjie: The grocery store had one to two years left on their lease but a long-term option to extend — 12 to 15 more years. They hadn’t picked it up because they didn’t have to yet. That uncertainty was why we were getting the property at a discount.
My job: convince them to extend. I knew it was a high-performing store. I also knew the woman who handled their real estate. Years earlier, she’d pulled out of a deal at the last minute. I ate the loss. I didn’t hold it against her. I didn’t burn the bridge. When I called her about the extension, she knew who I was and how I’d acted. Sure enough, she got us the 15-year extension. Property value skyrocketed.
Shaan: How you act on a loss matters more than how you act on a win.
Sanjie: Always. I ask myself: what would I tell my sons to do in this situation? If a tenant burns you and you want to call them and say we’re done — what do you actually gain? The other person knows you don’t like them. They won’t bring you deals. Or you could say, “This one didn’t work. Let’s find the next one to win together.” Life is a long game. Things come full circle.
Shaan: Talk about the three-legged table.
Sanjie: I believe your life has three legs: family, work, and faith — and faith doesn’t have to be religion. It’s whatever code you live by. The way you treat people, the way you eat, what you believe in. If any one of those legs is weak, the table wobbles.
I was working 80 to 100 hours a week from 2008 to 2016. Seven days a week. Up at 5:30, home at midnight. I thought I was being a good dad because I was always home every night. But my son called me one day from Santa Maria — I’d driven 400 miles to check on a gym — and he was crying, saying he missed me, that he didn’t think I lived at home. I went home every night. But he didn’t experience me as there.
That changed my path. I started shifting to real estate because I could build wealth without being in stores 100 hours a week.
Kobe and the Stack [01:18:00]
Shaan: You used to do motivational trainings for your gym employees. What were your best bits?
Sanjie: I always used the Kobe Bryant framework. He’d say: I work two extra hours every day. Two hours times five days is ten hours a week. Times four weeks is forty hours. Times twelve months is four hundred eighty hours a year. Over a fifteen-year career, that’s nearly eight thousand more hours than everybody else. You stack days.
The other thing: when you’re there, be there. When you’re at work, be at work. When you’re at home, be home. Don’t be at work thinking about home and at home thinking about work. Most people are flickering at a dim level on everything and they feel unsatisfied everywhere.
Shaan: I think this is even harder now. Boredom is solvable instantly. You’re tired of a conversation, you pull out your phone. You’re half-present everywhere.
Sanjie: The pacifier. You’ve got it in your hand. Any discomfort, you just pop it in. I tell people: wherever you are, make it your Italy. My sister was in business school in Bloomington, Indiana — not her first choice. But she was already thinking about the semester in Italy coming up. She didn’t make friends in Bloomington, didn’t explore the town. And when she got to Italy, she started missing things from home.
You can choose to have whatever experience you want in the place you’re at. Bloomington can be Italy if you’re fully there. If you’re half somewhere else, you get nowhere fully.
Shaan: I’m taking that one with me. Alright, that’s the show. I know you like to keep a low profile — I appreciate you doing this.
Sanjie: Great to be here.