A Community Outreach Approach to Real Estate
On this episode of Next Level American Dream, Abigail and Sean are joined by Michelle Jeong. Michelle searched for a life of choice, flexibility, and freedom, and she found it in 2017 when she started in real estate. She now has an impressive portfolio of multifamily units and has the ability to schedule her own hours, while being there for her children. During the episode, Abigail and Michelle focus on how her career was started, how she's able to make an impact in the community with affordable living, and empowering a new generation of women and minorities.
Key Topics
Affordable living for the community
Empowering Women and Minorities
Connect with Michelle Jeong:
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
multifamily, tenant, people, single moms, create, American Dream, reach, families, pandemic, community, lives, Michelle, Abigail, holdings, properties, real estate, workforce housing, single family homes, absolutely, financial independence
SPEAKERS
Abigail Thomson, Michelle Jeong
Abigail Thomson 00:01
Welcome to the Next Level American Dream Podcast brought to you by Thomson Multifamily Group. Your hosts, Abigail and Sean, will discuss how you can take your American Dream to the next level through real estate investing, business practices, and personal development. Join us as we share our experiences as a father daughter duo who are trying to accomplish our goal of financial freedom. We hope you learn more about how to define and achieve your American Dream. Here's another episode of Next Level American Dream. Welcome to the Next Level American Dream Podcast. We have an amazing guest for you today, but first, please make sure you have subscribed if you have not already. We also love getting your feedback through likes, comments, ratings, and reviews. Today, Abigail has a conversation with Michelle Jeong. Michelle searched for a life of choice, flexibility, and freedom and she found that in 2017 when she started in real estate. She now has an impressive portfolio of multifamily units and can schedule her own hours, while being there for her children. During the episode, Abigail and Michelle focus on how her career started, how she has been able to make an impact in the community with affordable living and empowering a new generation of women and minorities. If you found any value from today's episode, then please share it with a friend and help us grow. For more information on our sponsor, visit thomsonmultifamilygroup.com to start taking your American Dream to the next level through passive investing. Hi, Michelle. How are you?
Michelle Jeong 01:33
Hello, Abigail, how are you?
Abigail Thomson 01:35
I'm great. Thank you so much for joining me today! Just a fun fact for our listeners, this is our second time getting to meet and talk. We had some technical difficulties with our last episode. So, I'm excited to get this one recorded and sharing with our audience. And I'm excited to dive into your background, both professionally and personally. But first, I want to talk about professional so let's get what you're doing in your career and just kind of have an idea of what you do professionally.
Michelle Jeong 02:11
Yeah. First of all, I want to thank you Abigail, as well as everyone listening and this audience for participating. I'm very honored to be part guest with your podcast! So thank you so much for the invitation. My name is Michelle Jeong and I am Managing Director of The Difference Capital. We are a social impact real estate investment firm, very much focused on what I call the three P's. Those are profits, because obviously we're here to make money. But also, I would layer that with the purpose and people which kind of incorporate the last two P's. What I mean by that is that I believe in the idea of doing well by doing good. And that is that's thank you that is really the essence of what what my why is because we all kind of need that drive. We need to know we need to wake up and know what our why is that along with, you know, my family. They are that is my why's to raise the bar, and very much focused on workforce housing and affordable housing. They've clean and still relatively affordable housing for average day Americans like you and me.
Abigail Thomson 03:42
Yeah. So, I would love to touch on more about what you guys are doing to impact your community and the people around you in your business. But first, I'd love to know, how did you get started in real estate? Have you always been in real estate? Have you done anything before that?
Michelle Jeong 03:59
I have had a lot of different career transitions along the way. So, I started out in tech, as well as consult. I've been a serial entrepreneur; I've had my own fashion company. I've done health, wellness, and beauty for whatever few years, so I've jumped around in different careers before getting into real estate in 2017. Where I took the plunge and really focused in on real estate investing. I started out my career in real estate with single family homes. Okay, so I wanted to create my idea of vision in terms of the social impact is to create a portfolio of single-family homes that could focus in on single moms like myself. And what I quickly realized is that the single-family home market, they're much more individualized, they're much more operating their own bubble. And so, I shifted, I pivoted in the following year in 2018 to multifamily, because in my belief is that you're really buying into a community already. That's a property of fixed building. And so, the ability to touch more lives, I reach more families this way.
Abigail Thomson 05:30
Yeah. And that ties in wonderfully with what you're doing in impact in the communities and your purpose and people. So, you mentioned a few things you buy into a community and I we completely agree with that statement. When you buy a multifamily complex or an apartment complex, you're buying the units, all those and the tenants don't leave, and then you replace them with whatever community you're trying to build. You're buying into a community, and you want to build, cultivate that as much as you can. And you also mentioned you want to create work, safe, and safe environments for work, force housing, things like that. So, I assume you guys are buying mainly B, C class multifamily properties.
Michelle Jeong 06:13
Yes. So, I focus on B/C class properties and B/C class neighborhoods, you're correct. What I also do is I create, I've created relationships with various work for government agencies, such as the VA, rapid rehousing, I've had had relationships with women's shelters, churches, other nonprofits as well, as you know, I have worked with the section eight in the past. I, I'm very open I've worked with, depending on the location, really. So, another with another property. I've worked with the universities for student housing, as well as different hospitals. So, Wow. So, it really depends on the opportunity depends on the location.
Abigail Thomson 07:05
Yeah, it depends on the area for sure. You want to try and touch your community as much as you can. But how does that benefit? Of course, reaching out and having that purpose is definitely a drive and a why and a wonderful thing to be doing but how is that? How have you seen that benefit your business in the people and profit side? And people meaning your partners, investors, things like that, not necessarily people in the complexes and the people that you're reaching out to and helping?
Michelle Jeong 07:36
Well, I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of answers I can give you depending on the audience. So I do believe that if I serve the tenant, well, definitely, from a economic perspective, you'll get a better tenant base you'll get pays in full and on time. And that only helps economically it benefits my partner's right it. So So for instance, taking the pandemic that we're all kind of still going, we're all going through, let's not kid ourselves. And what we've done is we've created we've reached out proactively to our tenants right before the pandemic hit the first quarter of 2020. All the shutdowns kind of just froze our economy for such a long time. And we did everything from reach out and figure out the testing sites, any different Housing Authority programs, the rental assistant programs that could exist around that area, we looked at even things as simple as food banks and churches, different charities, we looked at when vaccination sites came out, we we shared all that information to help with the education and awareness in those local areas what what they what each individual tenants can do to improve their own individual lives to make their own choices. We also created different pandemic care packages, I call them. So and this is stuff that you can get creative when you work with multi families that agreement as much in single family homes, but we created Tennant care packages that included hand sanitizers and masks and, and other other goodies. We reached out and increased cleaning we increased our definite tenant reach outs to make sure that people we didn't have cross our fingers. We were very lucky to not have that many people infected. We kept our infection rates really low with what we believe better ventilation, better cleaning that our education And that being said, you know, our tenants felt safe. Yeah. And that only crease the stickiness and loyalty that we had. So in reality, we think throughout all my holdings, we only had one real eviction in the entire year, which is even lower than the normal standard rate. Yeah, because I believe that if you are proactive, and you show that you care, you'll you'll get a financially better set financially sound tenant, a much more loyal tenant. And it only helps the bottom line for partners.
Abigail Thomson 10:43
Absolutely. And I love how your your core to that is just simply taking care of the people in your communities and in your properties. And then how that spiders and splinters into everything else that you do, and how that helps the bottom line and helps with evictions, and helps with retention and quality of tenant, because people are going to take care of you, if you take care of them. That feeling of reciprocity, which I think is really interesting to point out right now, especially as so many people being really fearful to even rent apartments in worrying that they can't make rent and what's going to happen with that. And in reality that's really not being shown in our industry in a really heavily way, outside of what you said, like normal standard multifamily practices, you only had one out of all of your holdings, which is even increasingly better than any other time outside of the pandemic. And so I think that's really interesting that you brought that up,
Michelle Jeong 11:46
it just kind of ties back into the the why the purpose I again is if you do if you do good. And if you look to do good, then you will ultimately do well for yourself as well as for your partners. And ultimately, that's what I want to and that ties into the whole, you know, the profits, the purpose and the people because they all matter. Absolutely.
Abigail Thomson 12:13
And they all have to work together in order to create something that is all those three
Michelle Jeong 12:18
thing. Yeah. And so for any of you in the audience that a hold, whether it's a couple of units or or a larger holding, being able to see the synergy and see how they're interconnected is really important. In in doing business and and doing right and for the bottom line. And, again, we're all here for the bottom line, too.
Abigail Thomson 12:45
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's really awesome that you are able to bring those two things together. Because most of the time, a lot of people and a lot of the way it can be perceived is that you can't do good for the community while also caring about the bottom line and the profits and the success that you're creating for yourself. It just a lot of people don't see those things working hand in hand and in reality that they they really can and you are proving that fact to be very true, which I think is really incredible. Thanks.
Michelle Jeong 13:15
Yeah, I think I think this economy, especially in last year, we made, you know, we've all heard about the moratoriums that are going on and and rent freezes. And this rent strikes ility. And what frustrates I think many of us that are that own these properties is that we're not the bad guys. We don't want to be in this bad guy position. We really want to help I believe in and there's a lot of room and flexibility to help and luckily and hopefully with the correct still, like percolating are still filtering through more and more people will be able to get a get a hold of rental assistance that they need. So anyway.
Abigail Thomson 14:05
So I think that something that we haven't yet touched on, which is your personal background, and a lot of what has driven the things that you're doing and multifamily in your career right now. Can you share with us how you grew up and where you came from?
Michelle Jeong 14:19
Sure. I am a first generation American, and I my parents are poor immigrant family from Asia. We moved out here, gosh, several decades ago, based in San Francisco. I grew up here and my roots have been here for goodness knows how long but I am just coming from a working class family. My dad was an auto mechanic. My mom was had a daycare center for children. So definitely just hard working class. Lower, lower middle class background, went to public schools, I public universities. And I really, one of my why's as an American is to give back to my community as much as I've benefited. And I'm deeply grateful for the experience my life experience here. And so I, I want to be able to contribute. And that's one of the reasons Abigail that I mentioned, why I've targeted the workforce housing, because so many, I believe, just average american families have been feeling left behind. Yeah, and also not heard, and to be able to create a safe space in which they that they can raise their families just as much as my parents raised me. It's something I'm very, I'm very grateful for.
Abigail Thomson 16:01
Yeah, and I love that that's, that can be part of your WHY IS A lot of people don't realize, but entrepreneurship and what we do, you got to wake yourself up every day and knowing that you have roots from that's how you grew up into now I am fortunate enough to benefit other people that may have been in my same situation is really, really incredible. You also mentioned earlier that one of your motivations for single family was to create affordable housing for a safe community for single moms. Can you tell us a little bit more about why that was a passion and a little bit of a driver? For you?
Michelle Jeong 16:45
Yeah, for absolutely. I mean, look, I'm a single mom, I have two, I have two teenage girls, I'm in the thick of it. So as many parents can understand, I like many single moms, you look statistically at this country and across the world really were listed at below the poverty rate for single moms, it is very difficult to get the assistance that we need to create a safe, nurturing environment for our families and our loved ones. And so it's, it's not j it's, it's because of my own life experience, that I've really wanted to help a lot of single parents that are facing, you know, their jet world juggling, right, we're all juggling, especially now in the pandemic, as parents or have another, another flavor, another level of difficulty in the sense that we have to put food on the table, we had the financial pressures, we have the health, the safety and health pressures, to keep our loved ones safe. So all of that is really wrapped up into providing shelter. And so that's, that's one of the reasons why the difference capital is very focused on workforce housing as
Abigail Thomson 18:12
well. You come from such an incredible personal background, in addition to, like you said, serial entrepreneurship, which I love that term. And I think that it's I think it's important to point out that you are so driven to helping others, and that your personal experiences are something that keeps you grounded in when what you're doing and keeps you motivated and feels that passion. And something that I am really interested to know is what are some of those things that you you mentioned, hard work was one of them, but a few others that stick out in your mind that have helped you continue creating success and continue moving forward?
Michelle Jeong 19:01
Well, the idea of making well it kind of comes from the why I named my company, the difference capital. So I really want to make a difference in the lives of not only my family, my loved ones, but also in my community. And so, I mean has that's the reason why I called my company that it's really leaving a legacy. And I think that that is what a lot of us as in this country as Americans resonates. We want to make a difference, and hopefully a good difference. But that is that that has been a huge factor in both my personal as well as professional is, is that motivation of making a positive difference in the lives and the lives of all families. Yeah, leaving that lead.
Abigail Thomson 20:00
I can see I love how you put that. And that kind of ties very wonderfully into the theme of our show. And I think you are a vision of this idea. But we talk a lot about having an American dream and how the American dream in the US is still very alive and well, but looks so different from everybody else. So what exactly now? Does the American Dream really mean to you? And then additionally, on top of that, what are you doing in your life to take that and make it a reality?
Michelle Jeong 20:36
Well, you know, the, as I think you put it really well, American Dream means different things to different people. And that's wonderful. To me, it's not keeping up with the Joneses as much. In fact, I would probably dissuade people from thinking that from from keeping that mindset, yeah, because, for instance, an American Dream is different, whether depending on the location, but depending on your life situation, depending on your health and your background and your education. So the first things I would recommend, just like wipe that slate clean, get a piece of paper, figure out, what does this mean to you? Yeah. To be definitely doesn't mean, it means, for instance, I drive an old car, you know, I, I don't, it's, that doesn't mean much, having a nice new car, every couple of years. Doesn't, doesn't hold the same weight as it might to someone else. And that's okay. To me, as a woman, the idea of financial independence and financial security carries much more weight. So I guess we all can come at the dream with different ideas. And that's great. So figure out what that dream means to you. And then and then kind of map the Create a create a map to see where I am now. And where do I want to be in three to five years? And where I am now? How is it going to get me there? Yeah. And that's, that is something that I love about this country is that we can, we're constant innovators, and we constantly try to innovate our lives. And, and we, and that's actually encouraged. So that that is something I'm so grateful for this type of independence and this type of mindset of innovation and recreating our own lives, that don't have that in other places. And as a woman, especially to be able to have reached out and and obtain the education the opportunities I'm that is something that I want to protect and instill in my girls. Because it's only you know, it's it's, it's spreading that knowledge spreading that love and education.
Abigail Thomson 23:16
Absolutely. So you mentioned your recommendation for other people to find their dream is take like, what that five year plan looks like. So what what does that look like for you? What, what are you doing right now in your business or professionally, to keep driving and to keep creating that what do you say is, your main goal is financial independence, financial freedom?
Michelle Jeong 23:40
Professionally, I'm definitely still in acquisition mode. So if if anyone in the audience wants to reach out and partner I'm very open to learning and, and sharing experiences and seeing where that bus Yeah, I'm sure that Abigail will be able to share my contact information, but you can reach out to me via email, and it's the difference capital@gmail.com As for my personal, I still like the idea of carrying that difference. And I would like to work with women entrepreneurs, I would like to, I love the idea. I love teaching. So the idea of teaching entrepreneurship, etc, to encourage more innovation and more and more small businesses to grow. That that that excites me.
Abigail Thomson 24:32
Yeah, I completely agree. And I resonate with so much that you've said today it's it's really awesome. I love getting the opportunity in this podcast has really given me that the opportunity to meet such incredible women in real estate and in the entrepreneur space, and just your motivations and your passions and how I feel like you carry yourself and all of that it just is so impactful and inspiring to me. So I'm so super grateful that I got to have you on today. I just thank you so much for joining me in you mentioned your email a second ago, but is there any other place that somebody may be able to reach out to you or even learn more about what you're doing?
Michelle Jeong 25:15
I'm on Facebook, you can search 'The Difference Capital,' and I can respond that way as well. Instagram is an early thing in terms of posting pictures of real estate of buildings and repairs, it's not very sexy, but they can definitely reach me on Facebook as well as email.
Abigail Thomson 25:36
Okay, great. We'll put both of those things in our descriptions below so that they can have easy access to that in case that somebody wants to reach out or resonates with what you said today, cuz I know I sure did. And thank you again, Michelle. This was absolutely incredible. And your story is wonderful. And what you're doing in this your business is awe inspiring, and having that purpose and that drive in mixing that in with success for yourself is just incredible!
Michelle Jeong 26:05
Thank you and and the pleasure is mine. The honor is mine. And thank you so much for your time!
Abigail Thomson 26:11
Thank you so much, Michelle!
Michelle Jeong 26:12
Bye bye!
Abigail Thomson 26:13
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Next Level American Dream. If you would like to learn more about what we talked about today, want to contact the team directly, or are interested in passively investing and being a part of our deal room, head over to our website at www.thomsonmultifamilygroup.com -- Before you go, please leave a review! Your comments help us create more episodes for you to enjoy.