Landlord Association Podcast

Today we have Misty Flanagan, co-founder and head of marketing at Elevated Development, a local Houston based residential and commercial development firm.  Misty came from a strong corporate background having worked for a Fortune 500 general contractor firm before diving into her real estate career.  What I found so fascinating about Misty is not only what she has accomplished in a relatively short time frame in multiple areas such as development, marketing and fund raising, but also how focused she is developing the right mindset and surround her herself with partners to help her excel in this business.  As she become more successful, She began helping others and eventually launching her own RE coaching program called Her Mindset Matters REI, which is an affordable coaching program aimed at helping other women in real estate launch their own careers by teaching them real world techniques, how to overcome challenges and most importantly, having the correct mindset and build a supportive environment.  In addition, she also started her wholesale business as well as a remodeling business to help other investors rehab and repair their properties.  In this episode, we’ll discuss how she and her partners started with no experience to developing multifamily properties and running four separate businesses at the same time.  If you want to learn more about Misty, see the show notes below for her contact information and links to her websites.

Email: [email protected]

Elevateddevelopment.co

Hermindsetmattersrei.com

Hereforyouhomes.com

Levelupremodeling.com

Today we have Grant Burwash from Landlord Credit Bureau, which is a company based out of Toronto Canada started by a serial tech entrepreneur who was trying to solve his own problems with his rental portfolio to improve property management and rent collection. LCB is a consumer reporting agency when a landlord signs up, they can report all their rental payments to the credit bureaus and it would positively help tenants build their credit or on the other hand, if they miss payments, negatively impact their credit scores just like banks and credit card companies report payments for car loans, mortgages and medical bills. The ultimate goal empower both landlords and tenants and improve communications and help both parties more responsible. Grant is the VP of business development at LCB, and is himself is a successful real estate investor with a portfolio in US and Canada. He has a lot of Texas ties from his times living in Houston and graduated with a MBA from UT McComb Business School. You can find more about them at landlordcreditbureau.com and you can reach Grant at [email protected].

Today we have Michael Seago, a local investor and broker who has been investing in the great Houston area for more than 25 years. As he mentioned during the introduction, Michael graduated from Texas A&M and got a business degree from Houston Baptist University. He went on to become the CFO for a multimillion dollar company before following his passion into real estate. What impressed me about Michael is not only his wealth of knowledge from years of investing and but his passion for sharing information and helping others in the real estate business in every stage of investing, everything from acquisition, due diligence, rehab, as well as property management, which sometimes is the hardest part. Michael not only shared a lot of golden nuggets about his investment and property management philosophies but also what drives him is helping others to succeed in this business. He knows what’s like to be a RE investor and always has his clients best interest in mind. I was really impressed with all the ancedotes he shared and example of recent deals he and his clients have done in the last six to eight month during the pandemic.

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 832-439-8668

Bayou City Living

Today we have Evan Trinidad, President and co-founder of Tourlie. What’s Tourlie you might ask. Tourlie is a new start-up company that helps busy real estate agents with showings and open houses and also provide extra income other agents who has time and looking to do some side hustles. It’s almost like Uber/Lyft concept but for real estate showings. Some brief background on Evan, he was born and raised in Austin TX and has a bachelor degree in finance from UT Austin McCombs School of business. He cofounded Tourlie with Robert Johnson in 2019. If you want to learn about Tourlie, you can find their website and social media information below.

Website link: www.tourlie.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tourlie/?viewAsMember=true

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TourlieTours

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tourlie_tours/

Today we have Howard Wang from Alpha One Capital to share some of his experience in the multifamily real estate syndication world. As you'll hear in our conversation, Howard has a very impressive background. He worked in private equity consulting firm and performed valuation for over $600m of transactions. Then he started his own RE investment career about 8 years ago, and quickly grew from single-family investments to his portfolio today that consists of 529 units of apartment in Houston, TX and Atlanta, GA, and over 75,000 square feet of Class A shopping center in Houston as well. Not only that, Howard received his engineering degree from the University of McGill in Montreal, Canada, and an MBA from Rice University. So he speaks French, English and Chinese fluently and he is also a Level III candidate of Chartered Financial Analyst. In our conversation, we talked about how he transitioned from single family to multifamily investments, as well as some of the challenges he had over the course of this investment career and talked in-depth about a recent syndication projects that he's working on. If you want to learn about Howard or his projects. You can reach him at a1capitalgroup.com or call him at 832-815-9167.

Today we have Christine Lin from Fidelity National Title to shed some light on what title companies do during the real estate transactions in Texas and also what to look for in Schedule A through D of the Title commitment documents, and most importantly what are some of the state regulated fees vs. other negotiable fees.  She also offered some tips on how to save money on title insurance costs on future transactions as well some examples of difficult title situations that she came across during her many years of experience.  We didn’t get a chance to cover the COVID related updates on this call.  But Christine and her team at Fidelity has dramatically improved the closing process for buyers and sellers to work remotely during the transactions.  To find out more about the remote notary options as well as any other title related questions, please contact Christine at 713-779-7779 or email her at [email protected] .  Lastly, this was recorded with Jimmy Lam who is also the broker at Acres Realty where they are creating a education series for new realtors and we’re very glad to be sharing the content on this podcast to reach and educate our landlord association members as well. 

This was one of the last episodes we recorded before COVID. Sam Yee is a Vice President on the Debt and Structured Finance team at CBRE, focused on small balance apartment lending in Houston and across the US. During his time at the firm, CBRE funded over $2 billion in small multifamily loans and in 2017 became the nation’s top SBL lender. Sam has extensive experience in the servicing, underwriting and financing of commercial real estate properties.In this episode, Sam shared his experience in the lending world, why you should get a lender involved as early as possible and how to avoid some of the common pitfalls in the financing process.  Please stay tuned in the end where Sam will share some of favorite hobbies and interesting  traveling destinations. If you want to reach out to Sam to get the latest market conditions and COVID impact or to talk about your projects and goals, you can reach him at [email protected]. Please enjoy my conversation with Sam. 

Vivian Khai is a CPA and has a MBA from University of Houston. She has a very extensive professional background in accounting, project management, and software training on Microsoft Office products for small businesses and accountants. For the last seven and half years, she has been running her own tax preparation firm here in Houston and has a lot of clients who are realtors and other real estate related professionals. In our conversation with Vivian, she gave us a lot of good tips on how to organize our expenses, saves on taxes for the remainder of 2020 as well as updates on stimulus checks and PPP loans. I would highly encourage you to give her a call and check out her website if you have questions on your real estate related taxes because she does free consultations and would be more than happy to chat.

https://khaithuehouston.com/

Today’s guest is Huy Nguyen from eXp Realty and one of the longest standing members of the Landlord Association.  This conversation was hosted by Jimmy Lam where the three of us shared our experiences from both a part-time and full-time real estate agents’ perspectives.  As many of you know, Huy transitioned from a W2 job to being a full-time real estate investor and agent about five years ago.  He shared some of his struggles and how he overcame them to today where he’s completing 50-60 deals per year.  He also shared a lot of good insights about what it takes to become a successful agent and how to look for a good agent as a real estate investor.

This is a follow-up interview with our guest from the last episode, Na Guo of River Bridge Investments who develops residential and mixed-use projects here in Houston. She gave us an update on the townhouse projects in Independence Heights and her two new projects in the Medical Center and Conroe.  We’ll talk about some of the financing hurdles as well as regulatory and permitting issues that she had to overcome during this period. Towards the end, Na is also going to give us a glimpse of her personal investment philosophy om electrical vehicles and commodities which I found very interesting. So definitely stay tuned for that . If you are interested in learning more about Na or her projects, you can reach her at [email protected].