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 ex ..read more

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 loan ..read more

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 investi ..read more

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 t ..read more

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 t ..read more

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 o ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ch ..read more

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 ..read more

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 interest ..read more