Invest with Shannon

Alvin Johnson: Multifamily Developing

Multifamily development is the new wave in the syndication space. In this episode, Alvin Hope Johnson and I talk about how he started Multifamily Monopoly and the Hope Housing Foundation, a non-profit, affordable workforce housing organization.

Alvin is the President of Multifamily Monopoly, an educational platform where he helps investors looking into multifamily development and ownership. Starting out as a volunteer to now being a millionaire, Alvin has held on tight to his roots of giving back to the community. With the Hope Housing Foundation, a nonprofit affordable workforce housing organization, he’s helped many people find a place to live while helping investors do good financially by doing good in the community.

If you are looking to learn more about the tenacity and hope to keep your motivation and carry forward in your investment dreams, Alvin has all the information you need to get there. You’re going to want to tune in and hear what he says on today’s show.

If you liked what Alvin had to share today, go ahead and give him a follow as well on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

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Alvin Johnson: Multifamily Developing

I’ve got a guy on here that’s become a friend of mine but he’s a super cool dude. You are not going to believe this. He started out volunteering and now he’s running his own deals and syndicating apartments all over Texas. This guy has made an amazing journey through the bottom to the top and he’s staying at the top this time because he has learned some secrets of success that you’re going to want to know about. I’ll interview Alvin Hope Johnson and learn what he’s got to say about how multifamily development is the new wave of what’s happening in the syndication space. Also, how to reinvest your money, how to build your dreams and how to accomplish the lifestyle that you’ve always wanted. You’re going to dig it.

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I’ve got the opportunity to interview a friend of mine who does a lot of the same things that I do but he does it in a cooler fashion and he does it in a hotter state. Texas usually is hotter than Idaho but we’re running about neck and neck. I have Alvin Hope Johnson with me. He is the President of the Multi-Family Monopoly and he also runs the Hope Housing Foundation. This guy has been through the gut and the bottom. He’s been in and out. He volunteered at his last position to get where he’s at now. He started at the bottom asking, “How can I help you?” He’s now running syndication on his own. I don’t want to take any more of his thunder. Alvin, welcome to the show. I can’t wait to get into this. How are you?

I’m great. Thank you for the invite to be on the show. I’m super excited to be here with you.

Let’s not be modest. Let’s get right into this. You didn’t start where you’re at. You didn’t get a golden spoon. You weren’t handed this thing. You went in and started volunteering to see how an operation ran. Run us through your story. Tell us how do you get from where you started to where you’re at.

I started right out of high school. I had no college. I started as a painter’s helper. One of my ex-mother-in-law’s friends on the paint contracting company gave me a job painting baseboards and finishing sheetrock inside of closets in million-dollar houses in 1983.

When you hit rock bottom, everything from there is up.

You got the top-end job of finishing closets. When I said starting at the bottom, I didn’t mean he started in the closet but he started in the closet.

The beauty of it is those houses were big. These closets are 1,500 square feet so it wasn’t a little bitty work. I still had to get those nail holes right on that baseboard. A couple of years later, this guy went out of business. I started knocking on doors because, at that point, I had a kid and I was married. I was about twenty years old or something. I would tell people, “I’ll paint your house for $250 if you buy the paint.” I was good so I could run around outside of your house in half a day. I knocked on the right guy’s door and he was redoing a hotel in Belmont and I became this general contractor. From that, Shannon, I was twenty and had $1 million in the bank. I thought life was golden. We made it. The Bible says, “A fool and his money are quickly parted.”

If you need proof, you can call either one of us and we will tell you about that 30-year-old self of ourselves.

It quickly went away. This was the early ‘80s. By the late ‘80s, we know what happened to the real estate industry. I couldn’t find a job. On my son’s third birthday, I put a .38 to my head and pulled the trigger a couple of times but the gun didn’t go off. That’s how bad it was. The gun wouldn’t go off until I dropped it.

You couldn’t do nothing at that point.

I took a bottle of nitroglycerin pills. If you don’t know what those are, heart patients that have had open-heart surgery take these pills that are about the size of a pinhead to explode in their bloodstream to make the heart pump. I took a bottle of those. My ex-father-in-law was a heart patient. I woke up ten days later in intensive care and the first thought I had was, “You couldn’t kill yourself. You are a freaking loser.” When you hit that rock bottom, everything from there is up. I got back to work and my family nursed me back to health. I went and got a job for five years in a chemical plant. After that, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got back into rehabbing houses and flipping houses.

In ’96, I opened my first mortgage company and I ran two mortgage companies until 2007. That came open because it got heard, my commercials from my rehab company, on the radio. They said, “You got to be doing so much business. I’ll teach you the mortgage business.” That’s how I got into that. 2007 came around and we know what happened in 2007, ’08, ‘09. At that point, I had done this cycle so much. I’d started a nonprofit earlier. My appraiser friend introduced me to a guy that has 16,000 units of apartments. This guy told me he would help me. First three calls, he answered. After the third call, he didn’t answer anymore so I called him, bugged him, smoke signal, text every week on the same day almost the same time for almost a year.

In March of ’08, he picked up the phone and said, “Alvin, I’m tired of you calling me. If you want to know what I do, get up here to Amarillo, Texas.” I got the biggest suitcase I could find and I went up there, which was supposed to be for 30 days. After 30 days, he asked me if I was still here. He said, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I work here.” He said, “Good.” I volunteered there for 90 days and after 90 days, he started paying me. Thirteen months till the day I got there, he died in a car crash. He made me a part of his family. I’d go home to dinner with him and went to meetings with him. I went to all the properties and saw the properties. I met the staff and figured out why these deals were working and why they weren’t working. When he died, I became the president of a $1.5 billion company that owns 16,000 apartments.

I was able to use all of my mortgage experience and my rehab experience to write a bankruptcy plan for that organization that they laughed at, threw out and said, “Who do you think you are?” I got fired after the trustee’s bankruptcy plan was put in place. We started this work at Hope Housing Foundation. This organization hired me, put a new board in place and we said, “We’re going to go buy some apartments with no money and no experience.” I didn’t have any debts but it was still jacked up from a previous divorce that I paid all my bills up. I didn’t have anything positive except I had a work ethic and I knew that if I put my mind to something, I could make it happen. My first deal after that was a 110-unit deal down in Port Lavaca, Texas, where Chevron was the limited partner. I talked to them into letting me take over the GP, General Partnership interest, in a deal where we only own 0.01% but we worked out a plan with them to get them paid and we paid them. That was my first deal.

If you haven’t figured this out, Alvin is one tenacious guy. The reality is we all go through ups and downs. We all go through highs and lows. Alvin’s story resonates from top to bottom. Alvin has kept coming back. Calling the same guy for a year straight, I don’t know that I’d do that and I don’t know that I’d let you call me for a year straight. I’d probably told you to come on up to Amarillo a little sooner. What I hear you saying, Alvin, is that you kept after it. You saw where you wanted to go, where you needed to be and the skillset that you needed to pick up.

What you didn’t have on the first day, you learned over the next 30 days and the next 90 days to implement. To the point that you have created the growth and the lifestyle that you’ve wanted multiple times. Every single time that the adversity comes your way, you’re creating a plan C, D, E, F. Yet, you’re not complaining about it. I didn’t hear any complaints in there. I didn’t hear you blaming everybody else. I heard you saying, “These are the things that I’ve done,” and getting to that. Alvin, what has it been like to know that everything that you do, plusses and minuses, are 100% your responsibility and are firmly within your control but you’ve got to own them and rock them?

When I realized that, life changed. I put that .38 in my head and the gun didn’t go off. That was because I had already swarmed so much money and I thought my family would be better off without me. Thank God that He didn’t believe that. I didn’t go to college. Most people use maybe a college degree as a backup plan. I don’t have a backup plan. I had to eat and I had a little kid that was growing, needing shoes, teeth coming in his mouth and needed me. I had to figure it out. When I got beyond that to now that I’m a millionaire and then you get beyond that and you’re broke again, now I’m in the mortgage business and everything’s great. I made so much money in ’05, ’06, ’07 and ‘08.

I have always reinvested all my money back into myself, our deals and my companies that I did not think about saving money ever until later in life. It seemed that I always invested my money at the wrong time in the wrong business like a mortgage business in 2005, ’06 when the industry was going down and I didn’t know how to recover from that. The tenacity piece has been something that’s been developed because what else was I going to do? I couldn’t kill myself so I got to figure it out.

With the tenacity piece, that’s something that I see in everybody that I’m interviewing and a lot of people that I work with. When you’re at the top of your game, you’re not always at the top of your game. Tiger Woods has been up, down and sideways. It ebbs and flows but it’s the tenacity that makes you go back to the drawing board and design a better mousetrap. When you’re able to get back up, did you find that it was quicker to rebuild than it was to build the first time?

I would say yes but I’ll tell you the challenge that I had and probably that most people have. Because we have failed in the past, our mind wants to remind us of that failure more than it wants to remind us about the successes that we’ve had. If we get caught up in listening to those failures in our own heads, it impedes the process and slows our way down. I’m always investing in myself so I’ve got several coaches that helped me now and they constantly remind me. My first thing is, “I got off the phone with the bank. What if they turn my loan down?” Somebody with a positive mindset would say, “I got off the phone with the bank. What happens if they turn that loan into an approval?” It depends on what side of that spectrum you’re on as to maybe how your life will go. I’ve chosen to try to sit on the positive side.

Alvin, another great point is you can be negative but it’s not going to change. It quite possibly could change it because you could be snippy with the banker. You can be in a bad mood when you’re talking to the landowner or the property guy. You can have the wrong attitude with the realtor and he doesn’t tell you about this piece because you’re being a turkey. There are all these different things that can happen if you’re being negative but you’ve been able to go from one deal to another.

Now, you’re sitting here with 1,300 units of affordable housing. You’re taking care of a population that needs it. You’re doing it in a way that you’re able to give back to a foundation. You’re not just doing positive things for yourself but you’re doing positive things for others. How are you finding that that helps your psyche with staying positive? I can see what you’re doing. You’re going immediately from doing positive things to doing positive things for others that then help you feed that back to doing positive things. Your cycle is self-evident.

I read or heard Zig Ziglar say, “It’s easier to make your dreams come true if you can make somebody else’s dreams come true.” I’ll never forget the day, the first time that I saw a resident move into one of the apartment complexes that we own. We typically don’t see that but when I saw that lady crying because she was excited to live in that apartment. It’s in the hood. It’s not a great part of Dallas. She was super excited because we bought that old apartment complex. Let’s say old is 22 years old. We put millions of dollars into this. We’ve had it since 2013 and we’ve spent about $6 million on 300 units. When a resident moves in, you can tell that we spent money.

It’s easier to make your dreams come true if you can make somebody else’s dreams come true.

What I love to say is we get to give people a place where they get to live instead of where they have to live. A lot of those deals that we bought were living there because there was nowhere else to go and the rent was cheap. It’s a situation where you get to apply to live here. It’s not automatic that you live here because the rent is cheap because we’re doing a better job. When I saw that, it feels something inside of me to make me know that I wanted to do more of that. If we could do that 20,000 times, which we’re going to do in the next few years, that’s going to be amazing. Think about 20,000 people that you and your organization have been directly responsible for providing them housing, that could be 50,000 people. If you cycle that through ten years of ownership, that’s amazing.

That’s the other thing. Out of that, you’ve founded Multi-Family Monopoly, which is an education platform. You’re doing your thing and you’re doing fine. Why do you need to educate other people?

The education piece comes from the desire to introduce more people to what you and I do. Realistically speaking, I don’t look like most people that own apartments. If I can introduce more people that look like me to this industry, I can change a whole lot of people’s trajectories of wealth for their families. When we are out raising money for these apartment complexes, we’re not begging for money because we need money to close. We’re introducing people to these opportunities that we’re putting together to make money, make a lot of money and do well for ourselves.

When you take that perspective and help other people make money and change their lives then it has to come back to you. That’s why we set up the Multi-Family Monopoly piece. We were trying to buy deals and we couldn’t find any deals to buy that fit our capital stack box. It means that if you got a piece of money here and that money has to make a certain return and if you can’t find a deal to make that return, you don’t buy that deal. We went out and started finding ways to build and develop apartments that would allow us to put together the capital stack that we needed. It’s another form of tenacity and another pivot. Same industry, same thing but if we can’t buy what we want because it doesn’t exist then we go create what we want and then give people an opportunity to partner with us that way.

A lot of people think that because of where they come from, who they are or their financial background that they can’t be a multifamily apartment owner. When you create that education piece that allows people to understand how they can get involved, how they can be a limited partner in something bigger than themselves, how they can create that generational wealth. Also, free themselves from the stigmatism and the real-life box that they put themselves in that society’s put them in, that’s got to be an amazing part. You’re able to walk people through that and educate them so that they can come away being part of their own solution.

You talk to people all the time. When you open up an opportunity for a person to become a potential partner with you by investing in one of your syndication deals, we look at this as, “We’re going to create this opportunity. You guys can make a lot of money. Here’s your return and here’s some tax benefits, etc.” If we please step back and peel that back to what John Doe is potentially doing for his family, his kids and when they can invest 1, 5, 10 times with you into multiple deals like that, at some point he’ll get to a place where he may not even have to work depending on his investments with the bank. When you can create that and that cycle of ownership can go on for 5 years or 15 years then you’ve made a real impact on people’s lives.

The other thing too, Alvin, is when you develop projects, you’re talking about growth because you’re building from the ground up. You’re doing the original value-add then you’re going the next step further and you’re getting the cashflow to go with that. That’s what a lot of people fail to understand. When you’re in a wholesale businessman, you got to hustle the day, you got to make the phone ring, you got to get the guy to call you so you can flip that house, wholesale that house and can make that coin now but there’s nothing tomorrow. You got to get up tomorrow and you got to repeat the process.

What you’re showing people how to do especially in a country that is somewhere between 5 million and 7 million housing units short of meeting the need for people, you want to talk about affordability problems. We got huge affordability problems because we don’t have any inventory. If you’re not providing that inventory and those solutions then who is? If you’re sitting around and you’re a doctor, a lawyer or you’re the guy that’s working as the milkman that’s been able to save some money and got it sitting aside, what are your options?

You could go buy a single-family home. You could go be a part-time manager of this or deal with that or you can invest with somebody that’s got some horsepower that’s able to put you on a scale and take care of the toilets, tenants and trash. While letting you have the reward and serious double-digit returns that aren’t available to most amateurs because they’re not investing in investment-grade portfolios. They’re investing in what’s available in the market. As you and I know, we create our value because what’s available in the market isn’t that great.

That’s been the biggest thing that wakes me up. Going from buying apartments and we’ve syndicated about eight deals that have been great. Our investors are super happy. Going through the thought process of putting together a whole team from the ground guys, utility guys, the architects and the engineers to build these new apartments, high-performance buildings is amazing. It’s been life-changing for me too. It’s given me a lot of life left in me because this is exciting. You talked about creating value. I don’t want to talk big numbers or too many numbers but when you can build something for $1 and look up a couple of years later and it’s worth $3 or $1.75 or $2, you can’t do that.

Especially when you’re the masses. You’re the regular folk. I don’t mean that in any derogatory way. Alvin, your project in Princeton was $40 million. That’s not something that everybody wakes up one day and says, “I could take this on.” To be a part of that, that’s investment grade. That’s the stuff that Goldman Sachs likes to write a paper on. That’s the stuff that Kennedy Wilson likes to buy. It doesn’t matter how pretty you polish up your house, Kennedy Wilson isn’t going to buy it. There’s not a read on Wall Street that’s going to come by your house. They’re not even going to come by your neighborhood.

When you’re putting together this investment-grade product, you’re getting the economies of scale because you’ve got a professional maintenance guy that’s on staff full-time and is not trying to milk you for $90 an hour, a trip charge here and a trip charge there. You’re also getting professional-grade management, accounting, tax advice and implemented all the way across. As money is the way it is, you’ve got professionals chasing that with fervor to try and buy that so your asset is going through the roof. You’re right with your mentality, you’re allowing people to be involved in that and you’re introducing people to that process that they could never normally do on their own. They don’t have the $15 million and the twenty years of experience that’s going to be required by the bank to take that project on by themselves.

Think about driving down the freeway, you look over to the right and you see this big old apartment complex coming up and you go, “That’s nice. I sure wish I hold a part of that.” That’s the deal that you get to be a part of when you invest with Shannon or Alvin. When we’re doing 150 to 200-unit deals, that’s what it looks like from the freeway. You get to be that guy that can walk around that site with your hard hat on and say, “I’m a part of this and this will be here long after I’m gone. We’re going to do good by doing good.” That doesn’t get any sexier than that.

You’re making a difference in not only your investor’s lives but you’re making a difference in the community and your hometown. That’s the one thing that I love. You’ve been in Dallas for a long time. You’ve been in Texas for a long time. I’m in Idaho and I’ve been here for many years, pretty much my whole life. It feels good to make money on your community, in your community, improve in your community and looking around and going, “That’s a value-add that I brought to our community.”

I’ll tell you the part that excites me even more than waking up knowing what we’re doing. It’s the people that get to work with me or that I get to work with. We’ve taken associates that probably would not be in the positions that they’re in now if we were not in business and given them careers that they can be super proud of and excited to have. A couple of their kids work here as well. When you have a parent that wants their kid to come work with them, we’ve created a great environment. That is what excites me. I look forward to all of our associates being millionaires before they leave here.

I met one of those guys on another call we had and his exuberance was obvious. What he was bringing to the table, he knew was going to pay him tenfold. He was applying effort and energy but what was getting dumped into the backside of his cerebral cortex was going to power him to the next level. You could see that. Alvin, you’re doing all this stuff and you got all this other stuff but you’ve also got your 501(c). You’ve got your nonprofit that you’re doing things with. Tell me about Hope Housing Foundation, what it does and how it integrates into your daily life.

I office at Hope Housing every day. All of our developments are partially owned by Hope Housing in one shape, form or fashion. The reason is that we get to do good while doing good. We feed kids during the summer. We feed kids after-school meals while they’re being tutored in all of our developments. David went out and passed out meals to senior citizens inside the gates of our community. Those are the programs that we do with the ancillary funds. We feed people, clothe people and give essential living things like toothbrushes, deodorants and things to a lot of residents that don’t have them. More importantly, what we do is we reinvest all of our funds back into providing safeties and sanitary housing to the economically challenged and workforce communities across America. That covers everybody. Every bit of money that this foundation makes goes back into the mission of providing more housing for everybody. That’s exciting.

We’re going to do really good by doing good. It doesn’t get any sexier than that.

You’re steering that at the same time that you’re steering your development company. How do you find time for all that, Alvin?

They’re all integrated. Our development in Princeton, the sponsor of that deal is Hope Housing Foundation, the nonprofit. That development fits under our charter or bylaws because it’s workforce housing. It’s in that market. We get to do that. A portion, of course, of the profits will go to Hope Housing Foundation to carry on its mission. Some of the profits will go to other partners in the development. I got to pay the small salary from the foundation and everything else is paid out to all of our partners and development companies that put these deals together. It’s all vertically integrated. We could not have a management company without owning properties. We couldn’t have a construction company to build stuff if we weren’t building stuff. It all flows together easily.

What’s interesting, Alvin, is as I’m listening to how you built this thing, you built this thing that the head of it is a giveback organization. The top of the pinnacle of all of your stuff is a giveback corporation. It’s not that you get rich and then you set up a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You set up Hope Housing Foundation and then you go to work underneath that umbrella, which is not a backward way of thinking. It’s the right way of thinking but it’s not the way that most people do that. How do your investors react when they realize that they get to not only be a part of something big and sexy like an apartment complex but they get to know that everything that they do, part of those dollars are making a difference in people’s lives? They’re feeding kids, buying tutoring supplies for kids, putting shoes on people’s feet. You got to be getting positive feedback with that.

We have. We closed out a deal and I sent out an email to the investors that were in that deal and told them, “Thank you for what you’ve done.” We keep quarterly communication but I told them about the new deal coming up. We had four of them and they immediately jump in it. They said the reason they were doing it was not because of the money that they made or the returns that they got or the tax benefits that they got. It was because of the mission behind what we’re doing by providing good housing for people and they get to do good while doing good. They make good money and great returns while providing a valuable resource of housing. When you look at housing from a resource perspective versus how most of us look at it as a place where we live and get to make a bunch of money, there’s a different twist to that.

I want to take you down another road, a quick hard right detour. Alvin, I’m seeing this flavor in your life where you’re bringing people together and you’re doing good things while making money. There’s another venue that you’ve got coming up that is another opportunity that you’ve taken to bring people together that never knew each other, that met on some crazy app. Tell us a little bit about some of the other bringing people together that you’re doing.

We’ve started a movement called Clubhouse Live. The audio app, Clubhouse, has been around for a few years and I got on in December of 2020. During the holidays and people are still recovering from COVID or whatever and they’re not working, we were all hanging out on this app. We made some great relationships. That’s how I met you. You came out to our first event. The way the whole thing started was fifteen of us were going to get together right after New Year’s to set some goals then 15 turned into 30 and 30 turned into 50. Before we knew it, we were not setting goals. We were having an event. We planned this thing so it was ready to go. We didn’t have many ticket sales but I was committed. I commit first and then figure it out later. We committed to do this thing and nobody showed up. I was afraid that nobody will show up.

I was there. I got a different version than nobody showed up because there were about 300 people when I got there.

About 200 people. That only happened because all of us came together and promoted that event. If Alvin Johnson would have tried to have an Alvin Johnson real estate show, nobody would show up. I’m smart enough to know that I need to get with smarter people, better-looking people and people that know how to do things that I don’t know how to do. I elevate them to a place to the rising tide and raising all boats. If I can elevate everybody around me, I’m going to be elevated as well. We elevate a lot of people. Now we’ve got this Clubhouse Live 2.0 deal going on in Atlanta from August 12 through 14, 2021. It was a way for me to meet some people in January 2021 and now, this meeting people in January 2021 has turned out to be 5,000 people in Atlanta. Probably not that many.

What’s the goal?

For me, everybody has different goals. We’ve got speakers that have courses that they want to educate people on and maybe they want to sell some courses. The goal for me is to bring together a group of investors, athletes and everyday people that have resources to invest in multifamily housing. I want to show them a path.

This is cyclical. You started with the head of this thing being Hope Housing and now you figured out a way to bring people along with you. Now you found another way then you get on an app and you find another way. All you’re doing, Alvin, is helping people help people, help people. When are you going to quit helping people? I’ve had quite a few in-depth conversations with Alvin. The inside is the same as the outside. The guy is all about helping people by helping people help people.

Most of my friends tell me I’m the whitest black dude.

I don’t know that. I’m from Idaho, which is probably one of the whitest states. We’ve crossed all the politically correct lines. We’ve done everything wrong, which is exactly what we do as developers anyway. One of the things that I’ve seen with you is the intensity that you have for people to succeed, minority people, people who have been marginalized and sidelined. Be that what they may, you have reached out through that and you’ve said, “Be a part of this deal. Be a part of the Hope Housing Foundation. Learn something you didn’t know. Let me teach you. Let me show you something. Let me introduce you to someone.”

The thing that has been amazing about you, Alvin, is that it’s never been about Alvin. I’ve never seen that. I’ve seen you reach out, introduce and discuss. It was funny because if I didn’t know before I went there that you were the guy behind Clubhouse Live, I would have never known it because you weren’t the guy. You weren’t running around going, “Look at me.” Your whole life isn’t set up that way. Your whole life is a cycle of helping people help people. That’s what’s been so amazing. That’s why it’s been a pleasure to talk with you and introduce people to you because you are somebody that’s not only making a difference in your life but you’re making a difference in other people’s lives as they invest with you as they invest in the community.

You’re making a social impact with what you’re doing on so many levels because you’re helping people elevate their game, their lifestyles and even where they live and how they get to live. Alvin, my hat is off to you because you are one of the people that are truly changing America. You got this big, hairy audacious goal not to just do it in Dallas but you want to rip the cover off and you want to create 20,000 housing units in five years. Don’t put your back against the wall and create a goal you can’t accomplish because I know you’ll do it but 20,000 units, how do you plan to do that?

If you can elevate everybody around you, you’re going to be elevated as well.

We’ll do 1,000 units in 2021. We’ll do 3,000 units in 2022 through strategic partnerships. We’ll do 5,000 units in year number three and we’ll do 8,000 units in year number four. We’ll probably surpass 20,000 units.

I should have known you’d had it mapped out. This wasn’t something you threw at the wall or was making it up.

It was at first and then I figured out, “How am I going to get there? Now I need a roadmap.” I told you I commit first and figure it out later. As of July 2021, we’ve got close to 700 units committed already.

You’re not going to meet somebody with a bigger heart, more tenacious and got a better story about how they have turned rags to riches and now is showing other people how to do the same. Read Alvin’s story because he’s got so much to share. I challenge you to reach out to Alvin because he’ll respond. He’ll get back to you and he’ll put you in touch with people and ways that you can help with the Hope Housing Foundation where you can be an agent of change. Not just a person that makes money but a person that makes a difference while making money. That’s the thing that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed with you, Alvin.

I can’t commend you enough for the way that you’ve understood that getting rich is great but teaching your whole neighborhood how to do the same is more important. My hat’s off to you and I’m pleased to call this man my friend and business associate on so many levels. I’m looking forward to Clubhouse Live and where that takes us. Alvin, thank you for being on the show, dropping the knowledge that you have and opening up about the struggles that you’ve had because a lot of times, people don’t see that successful people have struggles, too.

Thank you, Shannon. This has been a pleasure and it’s been a real honor to get to know you. I look forward to doing a lot more life with you through some of the things that we’re going to be doing. For me, it is a gift too. Most of the time, we have to do this and have to do that. No, you don’t have to do anything, except pay taxes and die. When we can change that perspective and go, “I get to do this every day,” it’s amazing. I’m honored that I get to do this. I love the people that get to do this with me, that have come alongside me and believed in us to make this work. I look forward to making many more relationships with potential partners that want to change their life and the trajectory of their lineage.

Hopefully, you’ve gotten a ton out of this. Thanks for being with us, Alvin. Thanks for reading the blog. Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to the Real Estate Run Down Podcast on Podchaser, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts so you get automatic updates to fantastic content like this. You’ll also find us on Instagram and YouTube. We’re also at Clubhouse. Come join us on there. I’d love your feedback. Thanks, Alvin. Always a pleasure to talk with you.

Shannon, thank you. You almost made me cry.

Important Links:

About Alvin Johnson:

Alvin Hope Johnson is the President of Multifamily Monopoly (MFM), an education platform for serious investors looking to learn the process of Multifamily Development and Ownership. Alvin Hope Johnson is also President of Hope Housing Foundation (HOPE). The Foundation, which is headquartered in McKinney, Texas, was incorporated as a 501(c) (3) in 1998. HOPE has a business model that positions itself as one of the most effective, nonprofit affordable workforce housing organizations in the Country.

With a little over 1,300 Affordable Housing Units and growing, the Foundation is in the acquisition stages of developing or acquiring an additional 2000 units for 2021. Also planned for 2021 are two new single-family housing developments with a total of 450 homes for the Workforce community. With the resources brought in through Multifamily Monopoly, Hope Housing Foundation is on target to develop 20,000 units of workforce housing in 5 years.

Before fully investing his time into Hope, Alvin was the Vice-President of Operations for American Housing Foundation in Amarillo, Texas (AHF) and would also serve as the interim president for 2 years. Amarillo-based American Housing Foundation successfully grew from two apartment complexes purchased from a local Catholic organization in 1989 to one of the largest affordable housing companies in the country providing homes to more than 50,000 families and individuals, while supporting healthy communities. American Housing Foundation boasted 16,000 units spread across the Southern US. Alvin’s tenure with AHF helped grow the vision of what Hope Housing Foundation is and will become.

Alvin takes pride in being an industry leader in service and building strong relationships with his business partners. Through his faith and determination, Hope Housing Foundation will definitely be a frontrunner in the affordable housing market.

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