Affordable Housing, Manufactured Home Communities & Real Estate Investing

Host: It’s great to meet you. Thank you for taking a minute out for the program today. Before we get into your good work, I always start with the COVID pandemic question. Six years ago, this thing was changing everything for all of us. How did you get through that era, and how has it changed the way you work today?

Ali: It’s fascinating that you ask. It was obviously a crazy time. I took the opportunity to bunker down, become more spiritual and spend more time with my kids and family. We had no choice, but rather than feeling locked down, I embraced it. It was more of a relaxing feeling to me: it is what it is. The good news from a business perspective is that because of recurring, passive income, I wasn’t adversely impacted like many others unfortunately were. I had real estate rental income in an asset class that is an essential. In many asset classes, people weren’t even getting their rents. But I’m in the mobile home park and manufactured housing business, and this is the most affordable essential shelter you can get. Because people own their own homes in our communities, they’re not going to default and give up their home over a few months’ rent, or even six months’ rent. You’re not going to fall behind on $500 or $1,000 of lot rent when your house is worth $100,000, $200,000 or $300,000. So, fortunately, I was largely unscathed economically, and I was still able to enjoy that free time. I binge-watched a lot of shows, but I also took the time to think outside the box even more and come up with new ideas and strategies for the new world we’re in now. You’ve done a great job of switching from audio to video, and we made similar changes as a result. That’s a long answer, but hopefully it helps.

Host: It’s great. It knocks down a lot of dominoes. I’m going to put you in front of 13-year-old kids. It’s career day, and one of the kids wants you to explain your day job. How do you explain your profession?

Ali: We help people by helping other people. We help people buy their home. Then we help other people who want to invest, and they put their money toward helping the person who wants to buy the house. So everybody is happy.

Host: Love it. What did you want to be when you were a kid? What was your dream job?

Ali: I’ve heard you ask this question, and I’m going to give you a different type of answer. I was about 12 years old, and my father would hold weekly meetings. We had Friday night ice cream with him, just us five kids, and he would ask us questions like that. I remember he asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and my answer was that I just want to love and be loved. For decades my family ridiculed me for that answer. Everybody else said doctor, surgeon, engineer. I was really teased for it, but now in hindsight, as a 56-year-old man, I look back and think I had it figured out. That’s not to say I didn’t step away from that or go through the trials we all go through, but I’m glad that at my core I still stick to that. We identify ourselves all too often by our profession. If you can love yourself and love others and make that the premise, it becomes easier to find a way to be useful in the world. I’m still working on it.

Host: Love it. Where were you born and raised, and what were the foundational elements that led to who you are today?

Ali: I’ll answer the latter part first. I’m so blessed. I’ve been able to trace back eight generations so far of our family being in business as merchants, particularly in commercial real estate and income properties, going back to the bartering days in India. That’s in my blood and DNA. I never had the privilege of living in Asia. My father had already migrated to England when I was born, and I was there very early on. By kindergarten I was in New York, and since 1977 we’ve been based in California. Let me go on a tangent: early on in Southern California, that was during the Iran crisis of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and things were as tough as they are today in some ways. Mortgage rates went up to around 20%. You could only get gas every other day of the week.

Host: I remember my dad talking about it. He bemoaned it. It was bad.

Ali: I was young too, but I remember being in the car waiting in mile-long lines just to get gas. It was crazy. So we were in Orange County, then the Central Valley, and we’ve been in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, since the mid-’90s.

Host: Who’s been your inspiration, the heroic force that’s allowed you to find your footing in life?

Ali: I’m so blessed, because all I had to do was be a sponge around my father. He’s a serial entrepreneur. I joke that he’s one in a billion, not because we’re Indian, but because of his knack for entrepreneurship. He can be in the worst conditions and he’s proven to be resilient. He’s rebuilt himself three or four times. Things happen: wars, partitions, migrations, events out of your control where you can lose your wealth and financial assets even if you’ve done everything right. Those things happened to him, but he’s a genius at this. He has an education, but he was never trained in any particular field. It’s a natural ability, and I got to grow up around a guy like that, watching him come from nothing and do creative deals in his home country, in England and in the States all these years. What a blessing it’s been for me.

Host: In the realm of entrepreneurship, who do you admire? Who does it the right way, someone you’d want to meet and talk to if you could?

Ali: I can’t meet him now, unfortunately, because he’s passed, but one of the icons I like to study is Sam Zell. Before he passed, he was, I think, the largest private commercial real estate holder in the country. He spoke about my asset class, mobile home parks, or manufactured housing communities to be politically correct, as one of the best investments you could make. Because it’s a hard, essential asset, demand has proven to increase in economic downturns. He said it in a single sentence, he said it well, and in my opinion, and in the eyes of many, he proved it. I also want to add someone else just for fun, and this is going to sound corny, but it’s true: I’ve been a big Prince fan most of my life. Putting business aside, because it’s not always about business, if I had the opportunity to meet anyone, living or deceased, I would want to meet him, not just for his music but for the artist he was.

Host: What is the motivation for you as an entrepreneur? You have a lot of strings to pull: a family, your soul. What is that collective energy that lets you do it at a high level every day?

Ali: It comes from a couple of things. One is the natural desire to be a provider. Somehow that’s bestowed on some of us. I don’t know if it’s a gender thing, but I’ve seen many men in my life do that as role models, so I grew up with that as a given. From a very early age I took on immense pressure to achieve that level of success and be a provider, and I still find satisfaction in it, in small things and very large things. The other is our culture and the mindset of thinking generationally. My forefathers, my father and my grandfather always did that. Even when we lost wealth back in India, literally gold bars in storage, during the big war in 1947 when people were robbed and their land was stolen, you couldn’t take your money or your assets with you. When people talk about generational wealth, they think of hard assets and liquidity. I would argue the most important transfer of wealth is not that at all. It’s knowledge, motivation, tenacity, family values and morals. I’m not saying I’ve mastered any of those, but that’s the wealth that’s been transferred and allows us to rebuild. Knowing that it’s been passed on for generations is still a big driver for me.

Host: If you had a dream tonight and ran into the 18-year-old version of you, ready to change the world, and a 60- to 90-second highlight reel of your life played, would your young self believe your life turned out this way?

Ali: For the most part, yes. From a very early age, going back to wanting to love and be loved, I knew I wasn’t going to follow the conventional model. I wasn’t wired to be employed or to follow the typical journey of school, a job, working up the ladder and eventually retiring. There’s nothing wrong with any of that; I just knew it wasn’t my journey. My journey wasn’t better or worse. There have been a lot of peaks and valleys. But I knew early on that I would have to find my way as a businessman and entrepreneur. I couldn’t have envisioned being exactly where I am, but at a high level, yes, I had charted out this path.

Host: What are you happiest about in that highlight reel? What are you proudest of?

Ali: In terms of business or otherwise?

Host: Both, and all of the above.

Ali: Personally, it’s about family. In our family it’s ingrained that family comes first. I have three kids; two are teenagers and the oldest just turned 20. I’m really proud of the close-knit understanding we have. I believe they’re able to share anything with me, and as they get older it’s more like a real friendship, which I strongly believe is how it should be as they become adults. From a business standpoint, we just celebrated our 45th anniversary in the manufactured housing community business. We started in 1981 as a family office. Today at Rise 360 Ventures we offer a fund where passive investors can come in. For 45 years, that business has provided a passive income stream that allowed me to do other things over the years.

Ali: I don’t do anything else anymore, but I invested heavily in distressed assets, meaning distressed commercial real estate and distressed Main Street businesses. I got to see transportation and logistics, retail with perishable goods like flower shops and coffee shops, all kinds of things. I did a dot-com startup in 1999 in Silicon Valley, and I’m proud we were able to get VC funding for that company. I’m also proud of something from the early ’90s. Assignable annuities could be borrowed against, but a client came to me with a non-assignable annuity he couldn’t borrow against or sell. That wasn’t possible back then, but I’d like to believe I was one of the first few people in the country to make it happen.

Ali: For those in your audience who want to be inspired about starting a business from nothing: I bought an airport parking lot business. I say business because I didn’t own the dirt. Instead, I bought the business, which included a 99-year lease. Any time you have a lease over 30 years, you’re treated much like the owner, since even mortgages typically max out at 30 years. I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I bought it in 2005 for $2,500 down and $25,000 total. Within three to six months it was fully stabilized, and in less than a year I had sold it for seven figures.

Host: Wow.

Ali: I’m proud of taking a distressed situation, stabilizing it and seeing the opportunity the existing owners couldn’t. There have been others like that with small Main Street businesses.

Ali: For the audience member who thinks they don’t have the money or resources, it’s a numbers game: look at enough deals, find the right fit and get in. If you feel you don’t have the skill sets, go work on the business development side, for example as a real estate agent, and not necessarily residential. A lot of people assume you have to start in residential and graduate to commercial. I don’t believe that. You can go right into commercial, learn and earn significantly, as long as you can manage sustainability. Learn while you’re in the business, help others, and then start investing for yourself. My father followed the mantra that he would teach me how to fish, but he wasn’t giving me fish. At 17 I moved out and started hustling. I wasn’t focused on school right away; I started doing business. I was learning street smarts about real estate at home, but I wanted the textbook fundamentals. I wanted to be able to evaluate property and arrive at a valuation myself, so I became an appraiser. It wasn’t great money, but I saw active deals, met owners, sellers and bankers, and learned the fundamentals of arriving at a value, which is still the core of what I do today. Rather than just talking about my background, I want to give some nuggets to folks thinking about breaking in: take a position you may not keep forever, learn, earn something, ideally in sales where you can earn even more, and pivot if you need to. For me, it was finding creative deals. And they weren’t all successful. When you’re running into distressed businesses, running into fires when everyone else is running out, there’s going to be failure. That’s part of the journey.

Host: When you see the word retirement flash up, what do you think about?

Ali: It doesn’t exist in my world. It’s not in my vocabulary, and it’s not because I’m some rock star who wants to work forever. I’ve never worked, so there’s nothing to retire from. I’ve had a few stints, like the appraisal work, and I went to work for the Dale Carnegie Institute because I love Dale Carnegie training. If you asked me to suggest one book, it would be How to Win Friends and Influence People. Tacky title, but I see you nodding. The fundamental teachings, which my father learned from Dale Carnegie even as a kid in India, still stand true to this day.

Host: Everyone has a perception of you: family, friends, clients. But you’re the driving force. What’s your perception of you?

Ali: You caught me there. I know who I am, but I don’t think I fit into any category or box. I enjoy small things. I enjoy relaxing. Of course I love to travel, and I enjoy my cigars. To paraphrase, I’m just the average Joe, so to speak. In fact, my nickname was Joe back in middle school, because we had bought a KOA campground. That was our first community, the first park we bought, and the previous owner’s name was Joe. I said, I’m the new owner, I’m the new Joe in town, and it stuck. Hopefully I answered your question.

Host: You absolutely did. If anybody wants to delve further, is it rise360ventures.com?

Ali: You got it. That’s the best place to find us and to get complimentary information. We have a detailed report of around 80 pages about the asset class and the industry. Whether you do anything with us or not, if you want to learn more about the space, go to rise360ventures.com, or find us on social media: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, just about everywhere.

Host: I’ll put all those links in the show notes. What a joy. Thank you for your story and your time.

Ali: A couple of Joes swapping it out here. Thank you so much, I appreciate it.