ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Dennis Earls and Mikael Pyles, respectively the chairman/CEO and vice present of Haltere Group, a Black-owned real estate investment firm.
While we’ve discussed traditional real estate on the podcast time and time again, we’re certainly overdue for another conversation about commercial real estate.
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It’s an industry that can seem ludicrously expensive even at a glance, but Earls and Pyles told Corie that Haltere Group paves the way for participation in commercial real estate no matter if you have $10,000, $300,000 or otherwise.
“Our community, we’ve never really been taught on how to grow wealth, how to save capital and how to invest capital, you know? We’re talking about commercial real estate. To your point, it’s not easy. You’re speaking about a lender or a bank that requires 25% down from that borrower. So if we’re doing simple mathematics, you go and buy that apartment building for $1 million, you need $250,000 plus closing costs and not many — Black, brown, purple, or blue — are sitting on $300,000,” Earls said. “What we have done at the Haltere Group is we’ve provided an opportunity where individuals that look like us can put their money together as a collective and then we, as the experts at the Haltere Group, we invest those dollars into large multifamily buildings across the country that pay a substantial rate of return on a quarterly and annual basis.”
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Pyles said that his time attending an HBCU, Clark Atlanta University, transcended his paradigm in all aspects of his life as a Black man living in America, professionally and personally, instilling in him a sense of value and worth that now defines his role as a real estate executive.
“Throughout my career, one of the things that really resonated with me and the Haltere Group and all of my partners was that typically in real estate, the majority of investors are not Black. They don’t look like us, and they don’t come from the diaspora. The proof is in the statistics, we only make up — African Americans in the United States of America — only make up about 8% of the total investor population. When you look at our White counterparts, they make up 64% of all real estate investors, we’re at 8%. There’s a tremendous disparity there, right? So when we lean into our HBCUs and when we talk about the impact that Haltere Group is having on the culture, it’s about galvanizing our people to lean into something that’s going to create generational wealth together,” Pyles said.
Hear the full interview in Season 4, Episode 10 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.