By HoustonRealNews Market Analyst (analyst@houstonrealnews.com)

Trademark Chief Richard Davis

You may have seen the Trademark Properties team "flipping" houses on the cable television show Flip This House. If you have not seen it, we highly recommend getting to know this show. Although we question particular methods, they clearly know the business of real estate investing.

Houston real estate investors should be clear not to confuse this great show with the other ones on TV. There is another show entitled Flip That House which we enjoy less than This for several reasons, which we will cover in a blog posting at a later date.

The biggest reason that Flip This House vastly outpaces its television competitors is because the people on the show are real people whose ideas, jobs and lives play out before our eyes.

Much like NBC's failed show The Contender made boxers' lives real, so we get to know the Trademark Team.

These Five Questions were posed to Richard Davis, the President of Trademark Properties. We received a reply from Ginger Alexander - whom you know, if you have seen the show.

Ginger Alexander, Investment Coordinator

1) Investors see your large deals and wonder how you take on so much debt. Do you take the "Donald's" approach of non-recourse debt, and if so, how did you first get the banks to agree to it on residential properties?

We use private investors for most of our properties so they are mostly all cash deals.

2) As your firm has grown, have you developed any risk measures for managing your unsold property inventory?

We have 30 residential agents in house and they are constantly working on all of our listings, so we rarely have a large inventory at any given time.

3) Other affordable housing developers wonder about the economics of major upgrades to moderate-income housing. Can you give us your thoughts on what drives your upgrade decisions, regarding wood floors for example?

We do about $150MM per year in residential business, so we go from our experience with sales on what people really want out of a house, this changes periodically as new products are introduced to the market.

4) On the show, viewers rarely see Team Trademark working on more than one or two properties at a given time. How many rehabs does Trademark actually work on at any given time?

We usually work on anywhere from 2-20 rehabs at a time. There are also some that we buy that require very little work and we usually have a few of those at a time as well.


5) Part of your strategy is to rehab and market for a quick sale. Has the increased scrutiny of title seasoning, either through FHA or traditional lenders, changed Trademark's sales strategy at all?

Not at all. We make our money the day that we buy the property. We are buying undervalued assets and restoring the value or repositioning the asset. We are not buying properties that anyone can buy by calling an agent. We are buying properties that have to be repositioned.

We thank Team Trademark and specifically Richard Davis, Ginger Alexander and Corie Hipp for answering these questions for Houston real estate investors.

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HoustonRealNews Market Analyst