00:00
I volunteered for a company that went bankrupt. I had my own mortgage company that went out of business in 2009 with the crash. So how do you pick yourself up from that? And that's what I had to do and figure it out really quickly because I needed to eat. I have had so many highs and so many lows. I try to stay in the middle because you can get excited today and then tomorrow something happens and you're going close. And then you go from here to here. The hardest part of ending is starting again. You're listening to the Radcast.

00:30
If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford.

00:37
Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. We're talking real estate today. We're getting deep with my friend Alvin Johnson. What's up man, welcome to the show. Hey Ryan, man, glad to be here. Thank you for having me. Hey man, glad you could get in and excited to talk about your journey. Nice to be here, man. It's nice to have you, man. President at Hope Housing Foundation, multifamily monopoly, you got the gear on, I like it, branding. Thank you, man. You know?

01:04
I wondered if I wanted to wear this today, you know, because I didn't know what the weather was like. My friends told me I need to start wearing more suits because we're trying to attract more money. And I said, man, okay. But after this one. Oh yeah, I think you're good, man. Thank you, man. I think people, I don't know, I think the money follows the good. I don't know if it follows the suit. I agree with that. That's why I only got one suit. Yeah, man. So Dallas is home. Dallas is home, yeah. Yeah, always been home?

01:33
I grew up in a Beaumont, Texas. So it's Easter Houston down on I-10, but I got it out of there as quick as I could and lived in Houston for a while, Amarillo, Texas for a while, and now Dallas for. Cowboys fan? Oh, is there another football team? Oh yeah, America's team. That's it. I've always been a closet Cowboys fan. I'm gonna want to admit that on the podcast. It's out there now, but. Everybody is a closet Cowboy fan. They're everywhere. I mean, it's kind of, it's brand, it's.

02:00
It's like branding. I mean, it's why are they seated in my head? Cause they're on every weekend. It's America's team. You know, you can watch them anywhere. That's right. So Alvin, man, I know you've been up to a lot. I'm not gonna tell you a whole life story, but I do want to get behind, you know, what you've been up to and, you know, let's talk a little bit about your journey. Well, thanks man. Right now we're on a journey to build 20,000 units of high performance apartments in the next five years.

02:29
I got attracted to this technology called Structurally Insulated Panels that can go together like Lego blocks, really high wind ratings, great efficiency, great for the planet, near net zero. We can put panels, solar panels on a roof and have apartment building with no electric bill. So I got really involved in that three years ago when we couldn't find any other apartments to buy that made sense for my investors.

02:59
So I'll tell you, man, 2008, I volunteered for this guy that had 16,000 units of apartments. My life had fallen apart after my second divorce. And this guy told me he'd helped me. And so he met me in Dallas. He flew in, I was living in Houston then. And I didn't know he was flying in on his private plane. But when he walked in the room, he was so good looking, man. He sucked the air out of the room. And I said, man, I gotta be with this guy.

03:25
So for three weeks, I'd call him, he'd answer my call, he'd give me some stuff to do, and then I'd check in the next week, and after three weeks, he quit answering my call. And I said, man, I thought I had found a guy. I prayed for this mentor and this guy walks in, and after three weeks, he quit answering my call, but I kept calling every week. The money's in the follow-up, right? Yeah. On the 53rd call, literally one week.

03:53
I mean one year. He said, Alvin Johnson, I'm so tired of you calling me. If you want to know what I do, you can get here and I'll put you up for 30 days. That 30 day journey, Ryan, changed my life. I went to serve this guy. I told him, I'll sharpen your pencils, shine your shoes. I just need to be with you. He let me hang out for 30 days, asked me what I was going to do. He said, man, I'm not going home unless you send me home. I don't have nothing to go home to. And I stayed there for another year.

04:21
13 months to the day I got there, he died in a car wreck. But in that 13 months, he had allowed me to, he took me in as a son. He really mentored me. He was only 12 years older than me, but I felt like a kid. I'd sit at his foot, man, and just let him talk and listen. When he died, I became the president of this billion dollar company. I mean, they had 16,000 units. Today, it'd probably be worth one and a half, two billion bucks.

04:50
We walked that thing through a bankruptcy for a year and a half and I got fired. And liquidating bankruptcy. And man, I sat there and said, okay, well I'm fired. I ain't gonna get hired nowhere now. What am I gonna go do? I've always been an entrepreneur. And we took Hope Housing Foundation, they reconstituted the board. There was another organization that supported the other one. And they said, Alvin, you can take it, man. If anybody can do something with it, you can. I didn't have nothing to lose at that point. I was...

05:20
I had spent those two years, they paid me a salary after I got hired, took that salary money, paid off all my bills for my own bad decisions, so I had good credit, but none. No experience buying apartments. I volunteered for a company that went bankrupt. I had my own mortgage company that went out of business in 2009 with the crash. So how do you pick yourself up from that?

05:46
And that's what I had to do and figure it out really quickly because I needed to eat. So I'll go back, man, to my son was three years old, his third birthday, this was 1989. I got out of high school, no college, became a painter, learning how to paint million dollar houses in the 80s. Worked for this guy for two years, he went out of business.

06:08
So I had to eat, you know, it's during my life. Yeah, you gotta eat, man. Yeah, I had to eat. We all gotta eat. And then I had that three-year-old. It was his third birthday, man, and I was like... Damn, he's gotta eat too. I opened the kebap, there was no more food in there. We were getting kicked out of our house that day. This 1989 interest rate's 18%. I couldn't buy a job, I was a painter. So I tried to kill myself that day. I said, man, 38 to the head.

06:38
the gun didn't go off, took a bottle of nitroglycerin pills that are good for heart patients. You take one and it blows up in your heart to make it work. I said two or 300 of these ought to work.

06:51
When I laid down that day after taking those pills, I said, God, man, if you got a plan for me, a purpose for my life, then I'll be okay. And please forgive me. If you don't have a purpose for my life, then please forgive me. Cause they told me it's hot down there. So I woke up man 10 days later and said, boy, you're a loser. You couldn't even kill yourself. So from there, my family nursed me back to health. It took six months for me to get my shit together. And, and I vowed that I would use this.

07:20
fifth opportunity, because I had so many up till that point, to just try to make a difference. But I had to eat first, and you can't take care of anybody else, you can't take care of yourself. And so I got back to work, man, and after that, I got a job driving a truck for three years, working in a chemical plant for five years, hated all of that junk, and I said, I'm a real estate guy. Went back to real estate, started doing construction work in Houston.

07:48
After driving that truck for a few years, got into the mortgage business in 96, 96 to 2007, made a bunch of money, saw a couple of cycles of the real estate crash, you know, up, down, up, down. And then when I went to volunteer for Steve with the 16,000 units of apartments, that's why I say that part changed my life. Serving somebody else, trying to make somebody else's dream come true, he poured into me something that I couldn't have paid for. And then I got...

08:17
a master's degree in education unwinding this billion dollar company with thousand dollar an hour attorneys. And we wrote a bankruptcy plan and they chopped that shit up and said this is no good for us. I said it'll get the creditors all their money back. But they didn't have any confidence that I could have refinanced all those properties because where did I come from? I was a freaking volunteer. So you know sitting in a billion in a seat of a billion dollar company.

08:44
As a volunteer, that's how I got started. You heard my background. These attorneys had no confidence, so they wrote their own plan. The attorneys wound up with all the money. The properties went away. The creditors barely got any money. And we went off and started this work and said we're gonna go buy some apartments. And today we have about 1,100 units. We've got...

09:10
Let me see, we've got 200 units under construction now. That's a $50 million project. It'll be worth $65 million when it's completed. Princeton, Texas, we got 250 units passed through planning and zoning in Anna, Texas. That's a $70 million deal. It'll be worth over 100 when we're done. So we've got another 300 units in Greenville, Texas. So we've got 1,000 units we're gonna start this year. 3,000 next year, 5,000 a year after that.

09:37
8,000 a year after that, that'll put us over 20,000 units. We're building our own structurally insulated panel plant to build these panels. We're gonna get workers from the penal system that can't get jobs because nobody will hire them. We will train them to be our workers and entrepreneurs and subcontractors, a lot of people that love to do this work. And that's what I've been up to and that's where we're going, man. Hey, man. Where does your calmness come from? Have you?

10:07
Are we always that way? I mean, are you? I'm on a podcast. I'm not calm. I know. Yeah. There's something even about you, though. You're not even? Man, I have had so many highs and so many lows. I try to stay in the middle. Yeah. Because you can get excited today. Hey, man, I gotta clear the clothes on this deal. Yeah. And then tomorrow something happened and it don't close. And then you go from here to here, here to here. And I try to stay in the middle.

10:35
What's driving you? What's the driving force now?

10:40
Uh, uh, is it because it this success, like, is it still like the journey of success? Is it that, or is it like you're trying to prove something to yourself? All of that. Yeah, I can prove it to my, I gotta prove it to myself. It's a big lofty dream. I'm reading John Maxwell's book, uh, put your dream to the test.

11:05
I picked it up five years ago and couldn't finish it. I couldn't get past chapter one because I couldn't answer the first 10 questions about the dream. And now, a week ago, I said, man, I need to get that book again. I bought it, I didn't know where my copy was. I got through chapter one. I answered all the questions about the dream really specifically. I just told you the dream, right? Yeah. And now I'm gonna finish the book.

11:30
John says you can get through that, And I know it's coming true. I needed to get with a developer We've got the latest PropTech in there.

11:51
The air conditioner systems are engineered so differently. You won't get sick if your neighbor's got COVID because no air goes from unit to unit at all, ventilates outside. Tankless toilets, really cool, hanging on the wall, like you see in the airport. But really nice, I mean, it's really, really the best of stuff. And all driven by solar. And driven by solar, if we want to. No, we're not gonna put panels on the roof on all of them, but we will use part solar for parking lot lights, exterior lights and stuff like that.

12:19
and then we will provide one check out one pay option for the tenants. You just move in your lights, water, everything's on. All the appliances are there. Just move in the latest of everything. Really nice. So what are you all doing with the Hope Housing Foundation? Hope Housing Foundation is. Is the developer on a lot of these deals initially, because our goal is to do affordable workforce housing. So everybody's gray collar unless you white collar.

12:48
And if you don't work, then you fall into the affordable bracket or I don't want to say if you don't work, the income brackets are really different based on area median incomes. But what we're doing with HOPE is we're buying now assets that are there and stabilize, repositioning them, rehabbing them, and we want to grow about 5000 existing units within the next few years as well. So we've got the nonprofit side that's providing the affordable housing for people that make

13:18
anywhere from 30 to 80% of the area median income in any particular market that we're in. That's great. I mean, that's gotta, I don't know, it sounds cliche, it's like, make you feel good, but it's gotta make you feel good. I mean. Well, it does. We call it doing good while doing good. And when we partner with investors to do that, they can put their money in the deal and say, hey man, we really are doing some good. And let me explain it really quickly.

13:46
You got an area that is $100,000 a year area median income, okay? You got a school teacher that makes $50,000 a year. She's at, or he is at 50% of the area median income. The rents in that $100,000 in that market are probably $2.50 a foot. So two-bedroom units gonna cost them two grand.

14:09
You make $50,000 a year, how can you afford that? That math don't work. That math doesn't work. So when we talk about affordable housing, most people think about Section 8 vouchers. We think about the gray collar worker that goes to work every day that's barely paycheck to paycheck. Rents are going up so much, affordable housing is an absolute necessary. Gotta have it. Yeah, we see that even here in Greenville, South Carolina. Yeah. It's booming like everywhere else. Right.

14:36
Everywhere is doing that right now. So rents of 15, 16% increases over the last year and probably expected to do that for the next couple of years. Incomes aren't going up like that. No, I had that same discussion. Like I run a marketing agency and I'm like, our fees ain't going up that much, everything else is going up. Right, right. Oh man, all this is happening in Texas? Texas, Louisiana.

15:04
We're closing on a deal in Green Bay, Wisconsin, May 15th. We're doing 100 units up there right on the lake. So man, we're just wherever we can find the right opportunity and the right people, because we're doing this with partners. You say, hey, Alvin, man, I got 10 acres right here in Greenville. We'll get together because we have made relationship. So it starts with the alignment before the deal.

15:27
So I was the alignment before the assignment. My pastor, Keith Craft tells us that. Oh, I like that. I'm a quote guy. Nick, am I a quote guy? Oh yeah. I got more sayings than the book. Yeah, but I like that. Alignment before assignment. That's a good one. That's my favorite. Inspect what you expect. Yeah, I've been guilty of not doing that before. Have we all?

15:57
What do you do when you're not working? Thinking about working. You know, it's so funny, I was telling a young lady last night, I said, I apologize to her because everything I do is towards this work. And if I'm not doing work.

16:16
And it's not really work because it's our life, right? Yeah. I'm thinking about it or I'm planning to go on a trip about it or I'm coming to South Carolina to talk about it or I'm going to Vegas to talk about it. So it's all about, and I think that comes from a purpose, man, when you get to a place where you actually know there are two great days in a man's life, the day he was born and the day he figures out why. And when you figure out that why, everything that you do leads to that or points that way.

16:46
Amen. That is truth. That is truth. How, uh, how have you embraced marketing and social media and what you do? Like I, you know, I hate the camera. Yep. Uh, I never wanted to hear myself talk. You got a good voice.

17:06
All I do now is I'm in front of the camera and I'm hearing myself talk. But it works though, doesn't it? It does. Grant told me, he said, Alvin, the reason you don't have what you want and you're not where you are is because nobody knows who you are or what you do. And at that point, I changed. Being known matters. And it's not about being popular or being famous. It's about having influence.

17:31
And you can't have influence. Nobody knows who you are. That's right. You know, you're doing all these great things, you know, trying to get people behind it. We're going to tell people how they can get involved with it, but they don't know who you are, you know, and that's what we coach people on there all day. You know, it isn't about like, you know, none of us really want that camera in our face. Now Grant kind of likes that camera in his face. Well, he's got to a place where he does. Right. Yeah. He probably has always been like that. I think so too. You know. But success leaves clues.

18:01
And so the thing that drives me about him, you know, he said he was a screw up until he was 25, but he's had 35 years of consistency after that, just decisions. I look at my pastor, been married 560 months, however many years that he owns his wife every month, successfully his clues. So he's never had a year like this, because at 15 they made a decision to put their life together and do it like this.

18:30
And so they've had 35, 40 years of 560 something months of life like this based on decisions. I didn't make those decisions early, but I've made them now. And so my life today has, you know, my life has been like this or like this, but, and we'll still have some of those, you know, places where we peek out for a minute until we go up, but no more down years. Yeah.

18:55
What are your sources? I mean you mentioned the books but like what what are your sources for inspiration motivation all that? Where do you other than your own drive? Which is obviously clear people. Yeah, it's relationships I love to be around people that are positive. I Love to see other people win that's why we join our mastermind groups, right you get in a group like whoever and

19:23
You sit there and you see everybody in that group doing something spectacular. And then you look at yourself and go, well, I don't feel like I'm doing anything spectacular. Well, shit, they doing the work. Oh, okay, well, I guess I'm in this group, man. I think about 15 of the people in that group have become writers for the Forbes Business Council over the last two months. And I'm seeing them post that every day. And on the inside of me, I'm happy for them.

19:51
On the other side, I'm going, Alvin, you should be doing the fucking work. Oh, I'm sorry, Ron. I should be doing the work. Oh, you can. This is Radcast. Oh, you can shit. Fuck. Damn. Whatever. But I'm not doing the work. So I can't be mad that they're doing something that got some accomplishments that I hadn't had. So I love to be around people that are doing that because it just pushes us. Yeah. And I've I learned that the hard way. I don't know why. I mean, because I'm naturally driven type A in a way. But

20:20
It took me a long time, not because I thought I was better or like I really wasn't like, it probably came off as arrogance, but it took me a long time to learn, wait, I can learn, success leaves clues, but you need to be around other people. Right. Because you just, it's because you don't know what you don't know. And that's what for me, it wasn't because, I mean, I was seeking to know and I was.

20:42
pushing forward and I was having success, but you don't know what you don't know and people have been through things you haven't that can empower you. That's right. I'll tell you, one of my buddies told me, this guy I met, he called me off LinkedIn about four years ago, said, hey, I've never seen a guy look like you that's doing what you're doing with a nonprofit and apartments with construction background. You mind if I come in and see you? Guy flew in from Atlanta the next day.

21:08
And four years later, we're best friends. We're partners on everything that we're doing. And, but what he introduced me to Grant, he said, you need to watch this guy's Instagram. I said, no, no, I don't want to listen to anybody else talking about apartments, my model works. That was dumb. Yeah. I said, okay, I'll watch it. And I said, man, I like this guy. And now.

21:32
I would call him a friend now. I've had dinner with him at home and stuff like that, and not like this, but the influence that he's provided to me has helped change my life. So has, I think everything helps change our life if we allow it, but the App Clubhouse has been absolutely amazing for us. Just having an opportunity to talk about what we do and meet people and make relationships.

21:56
Well, I know we might do, maybe we'll do a remote part to this. I know we get our schedules run, but where can, where can people that want to get to know Alvin better get involved maybe with some of the things you're doing and keep up with you? Uh, Alvin Hope Johnson on Instagram, Facebook, all of the social platforms. Uh, and if you click the link on those bios, it'll take you to our website, multifamilymonopoly.com or Hope Housing Foundation. If you want to get involved in the nonprofit side, doing good while doing good.

22:23
I love it. I'm glad God had a plan for you, man. Glad you were here. Me too, I'm glad I'm here. I had an opportunity to spend a weekend with my grandkids last weekend and doing that regularly and great son and great family. I was the only asshole in the, you know, the black seat, man. Hey man, you figured it out though, so. We're working on that. Still working. Hanging around with guys like you. Hey man, I'm blessed to meet you and I know we'll...

22:48
move this along and stay connected. Maybe do a part two, maybe remote, we'll see. Maybe I'll come to Dallas and all this. We'll do it at your house. Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. Cool guys, go follow Alvin Johnson, get involved with everything he's doing with HOPE Housing Foundation and Multifamily Monopoly. You know where to find us, theradcast.com. You can search for all of this content. Search for Alvin. You'll find all the highlight clips from today. I'm Matt Ryan, offered on the platforms. We'll see you next time on the Radcast.