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.