Empire Industries, LLC…Your Partner in Investing Success
By Kevin Davidson
After his job was threatened by the aftermath of 9/11, Steve Rozenberg, co-founder of Empire Industries, LLC realized that obtaining financial freedom through investing in property is a much surer way of building wealth than working for someone else.
“I’m an airline pilot by trade,” said Steve. “I fly for a commercial airline, and so after 9/11 hit, I was on the verge of being out of a job. That’s when I realized that I needed to do something else to earn money because that secure job didn’t look quite as secure as I’d thought.”
“So what I did is, I started learning everything I could about real estate. I started trying to understand it. I read a book a week on real estate and I devoured as much information as I could so I could figure out this new society…this new language that I was engulfed in.”
“Then I started buying some houses. I sold a few houses then ended up buying an apartment complex. I sold the apartment complex and started buying a bunch of low income property, which is probably my biggest mistake.”
Steve met Pete in 2005 and the two began flipping houses together before switching to a buy and hold strategy. Then, after buying twenty low income houses within a year and a half, the two realized they’d made a mistake.
“We realized why we shouldn’t have done that. All of a sudden we had a huge waterfall of problems attacking us from all angles so we did what any normal male would do, we turned around and bought another 15 properties to try to fix the problem, which really just ended up being like gasoline on the fire for us. It just ended up making our problems ten times worse!”
The solution they created for their problem became Empire Industries, LLC.
“So to solve the problem we’d gotten ourselves into, we had to create a management company of our own, just to manage our own properties.”
“This is how the management company got started. We started it out of necessity, from the result of making our own mistakes of buying the wrong properties, but also figuring solutions out for that.”
Investor solution
Today, Empire Industries, LLC is the fastest growing single family management company in Texas. They manage about 750 properties in Houston and Dallas, and have a client base that spans the globe. Investors from California to Japan use Empire Industries for their property management needs.
“We’re the number one referred management company by realtors,” said Steve. “We give referral fees to our agents and we make them look good. At the end of the day, what an investor wants is a property that is going to make them money and not give them a headache.”
“Empire Industries is a full service property management company. Our services run the gamut, from helping people find properties to managing their investments, we do it all from an investor’s perspective. Because we’re active investors ourselves, we’re looking at the market from that mindset. We are in the business of helping investors find properties that match their goals.”
“Often, beginning investors fail to see results because they don’t have policies, procedures and structures in place…they run it off of emotions, not a business model.”
“What I always tell people is that when it comes to owning a rental property you own a business. Whether you have one or fifty properties, you run a business. Fair housing, discrimination…all of these laws that dictate what you do as a landlord say that you’re a business and the only one that does not realize they’re a business is the owner.”
Investors choose Empire Industries, LLC because they’re more than a property management company. As active investors, the founders are in “the heat of battle of owning properties.”
“We look at it from an investor’s perspective,” said Steve, “as a partner, not as just a customer/client relationship. This means our goal is to help them be successful and to reach their financial goals, whatever those goals may be.”
Investor education
From hundreds of free videos to free ebooks, investors have access to a huge resource of information…for free…from the team at Empire Industries, LLC.
Ask any savvy investor and they’ll tell you…learning as much as possible about investing in property is key to achieving success.
“Most importantly, have a plan,” said Steve. “If you don’t have a plan and you don’t have goals you need to talk to someone like myself and figure out what your goals are so that when you’re trying to find a deal you can know what that deal is, based on your goals.”