The TSC Story - Episode 1
Carl:
Well, here we are. Episode number one.
Brant:
Yeah, baby.
Carl:
I'm really excited for being able to do the recording. My name's Carl Moore, and I'm with...
Brant:
Brant Greathouse.
Carl:
And so we started a capital company about five years ago. And right now, we own about 60 to 70 million in assets and growing, and we have just been unbelievably blessed along the way to be able to build something so quickly and reach the top 100 in five years.
Brant:
Yeah, top 100 owners of mobile home parks. Who would've thought? Five years ago, I definitely did not. And it's been a ride. There's been lots of things that we've overcome against all odds. But man, just what an amazing journey, and we are now taking it to another level. We're trying to let people know about what we're doing, getting it out there so that they can participate on another level.
Carl:
Absolutely. Letting the capital that we have and that we're responsible for have meaning that goes beyond just making money.
Brant:
That's right.
Carl:
Yeah, so here we are in our first episode, and I think a storyline is always a good place to begin. So, how did we fall into being in the top 100 mobile home community owners in five years?
Brant:
So, that wasn't actually ever the goal.
Carl:
Right.
Brant:
The goal was to enter into this space. We saw a lot of benefits in some specific investment niches, specifically mobile home parks, and it lined up with our mission.
Carl:
Yeah. I mean, I remember one of our first conversations when we looked at that very, very first mobile home community out in west Texas, and I said, "Hey, I've got a lead on a mobile home community. You want to go look at it with me?" And you said, "No, I'm interested in this space, but not with a partner." And I just kind of... I love that because it's not like we brainstormed this massive idea. It's that we had this common goal, which was to do things that were bigger than ourselves. And then after a few days of contemplating and talking about all of the ideas, for us to come back together and say, "You know what? We would be better as a team than individuals."
And so, I remember we met together at your Megan's house, and we sat down, and we just said, "Hey, if we're going to do this, we're going to be all in, and what's that going to look like?" And we schemed up what could potentially happen, and we've blown that out of the water, accidentally kind of, and so we told our wives, "Hey, we're going to jump on a plane. We're going to go to Houston. We're going to go and look at... how many mobile home parks did we have scheduled out that day?"
Brant:
Probably 50.
Carl:
50 and which was completely impossible. But we took that first morning flight in and started riding around. And yeah, just going from community to community to community and by an amazing series of events, we ran into Catalina who gave us the owner's number. And later, she became our first manager as we bought that community. And I remember thinking, "Man, we're going to buy this community and operate it in a way that is a... allows us to basically start taking care of our families as we begin to give up the old way of real estate" because at that point, how many years had you been in real estate?
Brant:
Started investing in 2006, so that would've been about 11 years.
Carl:
Yeah and all of the stuff we had done before was us completely hands on in the houses with the contractors, and this one's in Houston across the state. And so-
Brant:
Yeah, pushed us to learn, to operate with excellence without being there.
Carl:
Exactly.
Brant:
And from there, it just pushed us and stretched us, building a team, building a culture, building a group of people who we're also on mission...
Carl:
Exactly.
Brant:
... who also had the vision of providing affordable housing, providing quality, safe, clean, and affordable housing. So taking care of our customers, our residents, and not just looking at them as a paycheck.
I think those things have translated into other forms of growth that is more stable growth than maybe happens in other investment firms, but it also just aligns. It's kept us aligned all the way through with the mission.
Carl:
Right.
Brant:
If you're doing anything in life and you're not doing it for any other purpose that's bigger than you, it's just not a very fulfilling life. It does not get you excited. Some people spend their whole life focused on how can I make my life comfortable? How can I make my life easy? And I don't like discomfort or pain or stuff that's going to present me with a lot of challenges, and the reality is is you cannot escape problems, but when you go after something that's worth it to you, that allows you to have a meaningful and fulfilled life, and it does a very interesting thing. It takes your problems, and it makes you get into this zone where you have more quality problems, and your problems might have been big and overwhelming before, and then your capacity stretches and expands by pushing yourself into this area that is the unknown, and your capacity expands to the point where you can now handle bigger problems as easily as you could handle those old problems.
Carl:
Yeah. Coming back to answering the question, “How did we get here?” Do you remember that barbecue we had in Pasadena?
Brant:
Mm-hmm.
Carl:
And so we went down, and we cooked, and specifically, you cooked because I think there were only two people in the whole community that spoke English, which was phenomenal. And luckily enough, I speak Spanish like a fifth grader. And so, we were able to be there and be in people's lives, but it also... it let us see the people, which is what we cared about most. And then as we operated in working with those contractors long distance, we knew the people that we were serving.
Brant:
Yeah, you remember, they said later that they'd been neighbors for like 10 years and had never really spent any time, other than that one time together. And after that, it just opened up that community.
Carl:
... they started having regular barbecues, and we put the soccer goals in at the end in that open space that was required by the city to stay open. And so kids began to become friends in a different way.
And I still long for those relationships with our residents, but at a couple 1,000 people, it becomes impossible to keep doing that. But I think us being there knowing the people, operating as a manager over our onsite manager. I mean, if it meant taking out the trash, if it meant meeting with the investors and anything in between, it was just you and me. It was that little bitty office over on Marionfeld where we put together our first little banquet and invited our first investors in, and that was a pretty good flop, the first one, at least.
Brant:
It looked pretty.
Carl:
It did. And I love the fact that Ashley used that picture of us that day on our current wall to kind of show back to that point.
But I think it has to do with the fact that we cared about those people.
Brant:
That's right.
Carl:
And because we cared about them, it was easy to bring people in to fill each role as we continued to grow because you and I didn't have the capacity to grow to where we are now, just you and I.
Brant:
Well, if you think about it, going from those humble beginnings, and then today with 38 employees, more than 1,000 spaces…It's just grown so rapidly in such a short amount of time.
I think another key component is our investors. They're investing in an asset class, but really, they're investing in you and I because they see the integrity. They see the intensity of how we care. They see the high level of moral standards, and they recognize that everything that we do is above board, above reproach, and spot on.
Brant:
We had one investor early on. He was one of the very, very first to take a risk on us, and he said later that one of the big things that was meaningful to him was that our numbers that we originally projected, we hit them. We hit exactly what we said we would, and we actually even surpassed them a little bit.
Carl:
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and especially early on with those first few investors, it was all people that knew us. It's one thing to talk to somebody and to kind of show a game, but it's like, we just talked to people that we knew, and they believed in us because we had integrity, because we had walked lives that had shown we care about people more than we care necessarily about profits, but as a business, obviously, got to make money. But we were able to do both. We were able to completely care for people and completely grow as a company and do well with that business growth.
Brant:
Yep. Yep.
Carl:
So that's kind of how we got to this point and going forward in the podcast, we're going to spend time talking about investments, talking about how people can make their own investments. Obviously, we accept investors, but it's our desire that what we have and what we are response for would be able to go out so that somebody, no matter what your status, could buy a mobile home and become that first time investor just making a couple 100 bucks a month, all the way through people who could actually buy the full community and go from there.
Brant:
Yeah, absolutely. We want to also teach people how they can be able to invest capital and create significant returns but completely passively. They're not going to be required to do the normal landlord-type stuff that you deal with with maybe single family or things like that, but you can actually build wealth and grow true wealth...
Carl:
Little bit of mailbox money.
Brant:
... long-term, little bit of mailbox money, absolutely. Mailbox money, building equity, building long-term generational wealth.
So we're going to be covering lots of different types of topics that will be surrounding, and we're going to talk about also kind of the mission behind what we're doing, why we're doing what we're doing, and how it all works. We're going to just kind of pull back the curtain on a lot of just gold nuggets regarding what we've learned over 15 years of investing in real estate, the things to avoid, the things to go after, and everything in between.
Carl:
Absolutely.
