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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, Billy Thomas shares his inspiring journey from a troubled past to becoming a successful real estate developer. He discusses the importance of setting goals, networking, and adapting to market changes, particularly in the mobile home park sector. Billy also explores new opportunities in commercial development and emphasizes the significance of perseverance and taking action in achieving one’s dreams.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Billy Thomas (00:00)
from my story, can tell that you can come from a nasty prison work camp in South Georgia to, you know, doing anything you want to do, you just got to do it. And, you know, I speak in a lot of schools and I do say no to drugs programs and that sort of thing. And I tell those kids, I said, you know, the biggest thing you have going for you is you live in America. You can do anything you want to do. You just got to get off your butt and do it.Kristen (01:58)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Billy Thomas, who’s the owner of Thomas Properties and Developments and also Hiwassee Island Luxury RV Resort, which is a new business I’m excited to get into. Thanks for being here, Billy.Billy Thomas (02:12)
thank you for having me.Kristen (02:15)
So, you you’ve been in this industry for a long time since the 1990s, and I’m excited to kind of hear your perspective of how the market has shifted and what you’re seeing. Let’s start at the beginning. I know that you have like a very interesting personal story of how you got into the business.Billy Thomas (02:31)
boy. Yeah,well I do. ⁓ I just have to start from the beginning. My mother and father retired from the Church of God World Headquarters, which is located here in Cleveland, Tennessee, where I live. So that’s how I was raised. I rebelled against that religion and went to drugs. ⁓
dealer for a number of years and an addict. Don’t mind telling people my past because I’ve clearly overcome it, but I’ve spent time 14 years in and out of eight jails and four prisons. Back in, I think it was 91 or 92, I was in a prison dorm in South Georgia.
Kristen (03:08)
Yeah.Billy Thomas (03:25)
Woke up, looked around that dorm, there’s 70 something nasty convicts locked in that dorm with me. And I just kind of came to my senses and I said, what the hell am I doing? I know better than this. I was raised better than this. And so I made the conscious decision, hey, my party’s been great, but my party’s over. I gotta go to work. So I called my parents. I was 32 years old at the time. I’m 67 now. And I said, hey, I said, I need to get.Kristen (03:46)
Sorry.Billy Thomas (03:54)
out of Atlanta where I’d moved to for those 14 years, I need to come home and start a new life. And of course they welcomed me with open arms, know, the prodigal son returns home. So I live back at home with my mommy and daddy at 32 years old. They bought me a Swin Mountain bike and that’s how I got around town. Living at home with mom and dad, convicted felon, had lost my family, which is a whole another story, riding a bicycle.and worked hard, stayed straight, been clean now for 35 years, I believe it is. ⁓ But how I got started in land development, which is what I do, I went to work for a local developer here in Cleveland, Jim Sharp. Jim was by far the leading residential developer in our area. And I went to work for him just as a laborer.
Kristen (04:31)
Wow.Billy Thomas (04:50)
and running the tractor, doing what we call grubbing lots, clearing and burning brush and that sort of thing. Still had my long hair and all that. But one day Jim got me in the truck and he said, Billy, I want to talk to you. He said, you know, where you plan to be in five years from now? And, you know, I was still, you know, just trying to get established, get started over. And, and I said, Jim, I don’t know, you know, I take it day by day.I don’t look ahead like that at this point. And he said, Billy, he said, I’m going to tell you something that’ll change your life. And I said, well, great. He said, you’ve got to set goals. You’ve got to set goals so you know what the target is. You can’t hit the target if you don’t know what the target is. He said, I would advise you to go home, set yourself some goals, some long-term goals, and some short-term goals. And that way, when you get up the next day, you know what you need to do.
to hit those goals. And so I did that. And my small goals were things like get my license back, establish my credit because my credit was destroyed from unpaid medical bills, from ambulance rides, from DUI wrecks and that sort of thing, fights and so on. And then my long-term goal was to, I always wanted rental property.
So I set the goal to get my first rental property the first year, get two the second year, which would give me three, get three the third year, which give me six and on and on. So at that point I knew, like he said, what I needed to do. So I’ll go to the bank and I talked to one of my high school buddies who was a banker and he pulled my credit and told me what I needed to do to repair my credit. Excuse me.
So I did that and ⁓ he loaned me the money to buy my first little rental house. I paid $16,000 for it, a little row house, so to speak. Remodeled it in the evenings on my own after working for Jim. I’d go over there and rip out the carpet, patch, paint, whatever. Rented it for a little while and then I sold it. Made around $10,000 on it. I used that money as a down payment for a four acre track.
that had just an old farmhouse on it, just raw four acres, an old farmhouse, demolished the farmhouse, cut it into quadruplex lots and built, I think there were four, four unit townhouse buildings when I sold it. There are now more than that, but I made, I think ⁓ the first building about 26,000, took that money.
and used it for the down payment on a 50 acre track where I developed a 234 lot mobile home park. It’s upscale mobile home park, manufactured housing community, which is basically a glorified trailer park. anyway, was a very nice, nicest in the area. Had a swimming pool and paved and curved streets and decorative street lighting, real ⁓
beautiful entryway with stone signage and irrigation and nice landscaping. So it was something that hadn’t been done in this area. I sold that development to a group out of California that has mobile home parks all over the country. That was back in the nineties. Sold for a million five hundred sixty three. So I did good on that. Used that money to buy other mobile home parks and just rocked and rolled from there.
Kristen (09:28)
That’s amazing. mean, such an impressive personal story really overcame a lot. I’m interested in when you kind of made that shift into real estate, obviously real estate.Billy Thomas (09:29)
youKristen (09:39)
investing is very challenging and you’re your own boss and there’s not a lot of you know the accountability falls on you so how did you kind of manage that having just come from sort of a rocky past where you weren’t necessarily stable what are kind of your tricks for getting into that entrepreneurial mindsetBilly Thomas (09:43)
Youyou
Well, again, I have to go back to the days that I worked for Jim. During that tenure, I met everybody who is anybody in the developing business, the surveyors, the contractors that do the water and the sewer, the engineers at the electrical company, you everyone that you needed to know in order to develop property. had met through Jim and they all knew me as Jim’s guy and Jim had
and awesome reputation, he great guy. So that helped me quite a bit. And then when I bought that first track with the old farmhouse on it, I just began to call up all those guys that I had met and say, hey, you know, here’s what I’d like to do. You know, how do I do this? How do I do that? Will you help me do this? And next thing you know, you know, I’m up and rolling. And after that first development, it was easy from then on pretty much.
Kristen (11:32)
Yeah, I think you highlighted something important, the importance of expanding your network and learning from others and hopefully getting a mentor to help you along the way.Billy Thomas (11:37)
YouRight, ⁓ And development, land development has changed tremendously through the years. Back when I started, you could basically buy a piece of property once you got your approvals through the planning commission or whoever. Excuse me. ⁓ You could just blow and go. There was no ⁓ storm water, erosion and sediment control.
Kristen (11:46)
yet.Billy Thomas (12:12)
all these environmental things that you now have to meet in order to develop. And it was ⁓ a lot easier then, but ⁓ it’s still very doable. You just got to jump through all the hoops.Kristen (12:26)
Absolutely, yeah, no, I love that. And so now you are obviously, you know, you’re big in the development world, but you also have a big presence with Mobile Home Parks. I would love for you to talk about the opportunity there.Billy Thomas (12:37)
YouWell, mobile home parks are, that was my first large development was the mobile home park that I sold to California group. Mobile home parks are gold mines for residual income. And I also had mobile home dealerships and I would, had one dealership called repo depot where I bought repossessed mobile homes from mortgage companies. And I would bring them into my lot, refurbish them.
Well, if I had a mobile home park that had a dilapidated mobile home on it, I’d just take one from my dealership, pull that old dilapidated home out, put the new one in it and raise the quality of the park and the quality of the tenants and the income. so that there’s a lot of, ⁓ a lot of opportunity in mobile home parks and as, most of your viewers will know.
Kristen (13:36)
Yeah, absolutely. Ithink that’s amazing. And then, you you’ve seen kind of, you know, talking about how the market’s changing. You’ve been in it for a while. You’ve seen the ups and downs. What is your advice on kind of the changing market and remaining steady and remaining, you know, agile within it?
Billy Thomas (13:39)
HeyWell, obviously you have to do your due diligence. ⁓ The industry has tightened up quite a bit. I’d say ⁓ prices are up. You could buy parts ⁓ much cheaper than what you can buy them now. I think that’s because people have realized the value in them. It’s ⁓ just a harder market to get into now than it was.
⁓ previously. You have to pay a little more, your cap rates a little less, but it’s still a great market to tap into.
Kristen (14:39)
Yeah, and kind of I would love for you to talk about maybe like shifting strategies, like adapting your portfolio to the market.Billy Thomas (15:29)
Well, yeah, ⁓ when I first got into it and I’ll go back to that original park, my plan at that point was just to develop the park and let dealers fill the lots with mobile homes that they had sold. And I just get the lot rent because that was virtually zero maintenance. You’re written in my space. They cut their own grass. Something breaks in their home. It’s on them because they’re homeowners.There’s not much that can go wrong maintenance wise with a mobile home lot. So that was my original plan. So I was only planning on having that one income, which was lot rent. When I hooked up with Clayton Homes, I became a Clayton dealer. I went from one income on that same project to nine different incomes. And it was amazing. They sent me up as a dealer.
So I made the profit from the sale of the homes. ⁓ I got kickbacks on the financing. I could bump the rates. Clayton has their own finance group, so they would finance my buyers. They actually financed the entire development for me. So they were very deeply invested in me, so they knew that I had to have home sales to make this whole project work. So…
They would finance the homes. could bump the rate. So every time one of my residents sent their mortgage payment in, I would get a kickback of whatever the bump was, 2 % or whatever, which was typically 30 to $70 times at that time, 77. So that got up to thousands of dollars a month. Resale of the tires and axles back to the factory was cash money, thousands of dollars. As you compile all the tires and axles that came out from under the mobile homes.
I did a TVA Energy Right community. TVA gave me $550 every time I brought a home in because I would order the homes with the TVA Energy Right package, which didn’t cost me anything. I passed it on to the buyer of the home, of course. So like I say, when I first went to develop that park, my plan was only to rent lots and not own any homes, but
That was at the point where the market and the finance market was changing and financing tightened up to where lenders would not lend money for the most part, would not lend money to ⁓ chattel loans where people wanted to buy a mobile home and put it in a park. If they didn’t have land to go with it, they couldn’t get financing. So that kind of forced me and forced…
pretty much everyone in the mobile home park business to start owning homes. So through the years, as I continued to buy mobile home parks, what I did basically was I would buy a dumpy mobile home park that needed renovation. And I would do, like I was saying earlier, I would take the old homes out, get the juggies out, bring in a new home, get a family in, raise the rent.
because it was a newer, more modern home, larger home. But my goal was to own every home in the park. so that’s what I’ve done for the last several years. I would buy existing parks and renovate them and update them, get the income stream up.
Kristen (18:49)
youYeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, you’re definitely very conscious of what’s going on in the market and adopting your strategy to that. I know that you’re kind of looking into the commercial space now. Can you talk about what you’re seeing there?
Billy Thomas (19:09)
.Well, I am. just starting to look into that. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always been into…
I’ve lost sound, so. Okay, I got you back. Okay, I’m just beginning to look into commercial development. I’ve always done income producing RV parks and mobile home parks mainly. But I have the opportunity now, I have an offer accepted by the seller on a commercial track in the same little town where I did my RV resort.
Kristen (19:41)
there it is. right. Yeah.Billy Thomas (20:05)
Has an existing building on it that’s very old and dilapidated ⁓ City sewer is about a hundred yards down the road So I have sewer available. I just have to extend it which I’ve met with the Tennessee Department of Transportation and the sewer engineers for the utility company and it’s definitely a doable thing so ⁓ My plan there is to demolish the existing structure extend the city sewer to itwhich is vital, and then develop it into some type of commercial development. I’m not sure exactly ⁓ what I’m going to do with it yet. thought originally I might do townhouse lots. ⁓ I talked to the mayor of the town to kind of get a feel from him what he thought the biggest need in the area was. There’s very little shopping, so I thought maybe I’d do a commercial.
Kristen (21:00)
Great.Billy Thomas (21:04)
plaza with retail and office space in it. And then I just put a post on that community’s Facebook page and I said, hey, what in your opinion does the city of Charleston need in way of development? And the vast majority of responses I got was hardware store, feed store, hardware feed, feed hardware.Kristen (21:07)
And cool.Billy Thomas (21:29)
There used to be an ACE Hardware there years ago, but it closed down for whatever reason. And so you have to go into Cleveland, the next town, which is same county, but it’s 10 miles away, to buy building materials and hardware supplies and feed, go to tractor supplier, wherever. So I have reached out to ACE Hardware and they are currently looking at the feasibility of me.adding an ACE hardware location there. I don’t want to own and operate an ACE hardware, but they said they have franchise owners that would probably be very interested if I developed the property, which is what I do.
Kristen (22:07)
Yeah.Yeah, that’s amazing. mean, and you’re also highlighting a lot of different avenues. There’s not just one way to kind of acquire a portfolio. You can go about it in multiple ways and franchising is, I think, a great option that people don’t necessarily think of right away. So we’re getting, you know, towards the end of our time, you’ve given us such good inspiration and insight. Just one second. There’s like something’s going on out here. There’s so many sirens. I’m going to wait for it to…
Billy Thomas (22:29)
All right.you
Yeah.
⁓
Kristen (22:43)
Okay,you’ve given us such great inspiration about your perseverance and the way you were able to, you know, turn your life around and really build an empire. To kind of wrap it all up, what would be one piece of advice that you wish you learned earlier in your career that you could share with us today?
Billy Thomas (23:01)
Well, I think it would be what Jim taught me set goals You know a lot of people don’t have goals and they just kind of go through life, you know doing what comes normal and They a lot of people don’t think that they can accomplish The larger goals that they may wish they had set but obviouslyKristen (23:06)
Yeah.Right.
Billy Thomas (23:29)
from my story, can tell that you can come from a nasty prison work camp in South Georgia to, you know, doing anything you want to do, you just got to do it. And, you know, I speak in a lot of schools and I do say no to drugs programs and that sort of thing. And I tell those kids, I said, you know, the biggest thing you have going for you is you live in America. You can do anything you want to do. You just got to get off your butt and do it.So that would be.
Kristen (23:57)
Yeah.Billy Thomas (23:58)
my advice, set some goals and just do it.Kristen (24:03)
I love that. I think that’s a great note to end on. So tell everyone where to find you.Billy Thomas (24:09)
⁓ Of course, I’m on Facebook, Billy Thomas. I have a website for the RV Resort, Hiawassee Island. That’s H-I-A-W-A-S-S-E-E, HiawaseeIsland.com. Also, I have a Facebook page for that. Same name as the resort, Hiawassee Island Luxury RV Resort, LSC. ⁓ My phone number, my cell phone is 423-650-2168 and that’s on 24-7.Kristen (24:43)
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Billy.Billy Thomas (24:46)
Well, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed it. And hopefully we’ll get to do some business out of this.Kristen (24:54)
Yes, I hope so too. I really encourage everyone to check Billy out. And we hope that you learned a lot from this episode and got some inspiration for your own business. So we’ll see you back next time. Bye.
