Meet Anderson Schulle. He is the Director of Investment Sales at Champions DFW Commercial Realty. He invested nearly an hour of his time to share his expertise with Ron Taylor and Jim Kelley for an edition of Texas Money & Business on 620 AM in the Dallas / Fort Worth area.
This is an excerpt of their conversation. The entire conversation is available on podcast, and it’s a free download here on ChampionsDFW.com and on iTunes.
Jim Kelley: We’re going to jump right into it. Let’s meet Anderson Schulle. Give us your background and a bio about yourself.
Anderson Schulle
Meet Anderson Schulle: Sure, sure, glad to do that. I grew up in Germany and my family is very international. We’ve moved around a bit. After growing up in Germany, getting all my education there, my basic school education, my formation, my family moved to Brazil. So we’ve been in those continents. That’s were I met my wife, in Brazil and all of that. I got my education in Brazil. I thought I would go into Christian ministry and got a pastoral education there. We moved to Indianapolis in the United States in 2001 to further our education, both my wife and I. Along that route somewhere…a long story short or a long story long…basically got into working in the corporate world and was really looking for a way to grow there.
After several years, I just realized, corporate world was not for me. My core values and really my passion is to serve people and to walk alongside them. That was part of when I was involved in ministry. Walk alongside them in a meaningful way. My family has been doing real estate since I remember myself as a little kid and so my parents have done commercial development. They’ve built churches, they’ve done residential stuff. So I remember them always doing real estate and how that has been a blessing in their life. Financially it has been a blessing in our family. So I had a change of heart, maybe in 2012, I believe 2011, 2012 and decided to get into real estate myself. That’s been my path since then, to get involved in real estate.
Jim Kelley: Well, talk to us about how you first got into real estate because I think that’s cool, Anderson. What brought you into real estate? You had the vast background with the family in it and that attracted you to it, but how did you actually get into it?
Anderson Schulle: Yeah, I was working. I had an exciting job in the corporate world. I was a business developer for a sports video games company from Sweden. I loved the traveling. I loved putting together transactions and relationships that help us grow the company. But real estate, I thought was a much better way to serve and walk alongside people. And for myself, also to invest myself.
I got started initially in residential, working with investors that wanted single family homes. In that, I started a property management company that I still own today and working with investors that wanted to get basically rental income and so build a portfolio of rental income. I got that started in Indianapolis but moved specifically to Texas because of the market here. So that really attracted me. So series of events, we moved to Dallas, Fort Worth, in 2014 and started the property management company here and was working basically with investors from here. Then my international background was just an obvious platform to work with international investors.
So basically with my wife being from Brazil, me knowing Portuguese, we thought, let’s see if Brazilians would be interested in investing in Texas. So we started working on that and basically bringing Brazilian investors here. A lot of our clients are right now from Latin America.
Ron Taylor: Wow, that’s fantastic. How do you find business here in North Texas so far?
Meet Anderson Schulle: Well, I love not just the climate, the people, but the economy, and all of that. It’s just phenomenal. A lot of what I have to do when we work with international investors is educating them. We can talk a little more about that later. But just explaining to people that Texas is not a place where the horses and the cows run around and all of that.
But our city alone is probably top 25 economy in the world, our city. When I tell people that, “Hey, the GDP, the gross product of Dallas, Fort Worth is bigger than Argentina,” people raise their eyebrows. We’re as large as some other countries, in terms of our population so it’s just a phenomenal place to invest and to do business in. When I connected those dots, I was just excited about being part of this.
Jim Kelley: Anderson brought a lot of passion, a lot of focus on commercial real estate and working with clients and providing a holistic solution to their requirements, to their needs. As he said, they’ve been blessed. We all on the Champions team have been extremely blessed. There’s new opportunities everyday. We live in a very dynamic marketplace.
Ron Taylor: We do have a wonderful melting pot here in Dallas, Fort Worth. Ranked as the, probably right now we’re still number five in terms of a major market area. With all the influx of business in the commercial realty that’s developing, we talked about in the last segment, it’s got to be exciting to have someone like Anderson on board who can serve more as an international, if you will…I’ll use the word, it’s kind of a big word…ambassador in many ways to those in the community that have needs. There’s no language barrier, things like that. So there’s a lot of great things. Plus, the expertise that he brings.
Jim Kelley: Absolutely, he brings expertise. But he also speaks four languages But Anderson, let’s talk about how you’ve actually reached out to the South and Latin American countries and your plans for Asia.
Meet Anderson Schulle: Yeah, yeah. Basically when I was working initially with investors from Brazil, the big barrier I saw was educating them about Texas and even working with other investors even nationally, but specifically from Asia or Europe. They just don’t understand Texas because they haven’t been here. So the first destination is always New York and then sometimes Los Angeles and then Florida. So those are the first three places that anybody from outside the country thinks of first when they think United States and when they think real estate investing.
So a lot of what I had to do was basically educating them and doing that in a graceful way, not getting hung up on their ignorance, to a certain way. But actually showing them what’s going on and what the opportunities are and bringing them alongside and allowing them to have their eyes opened that way. So we’ve done a lot of expose in Brazil specifically where I’ve been a speaker there, talking about Texas and talking about the real estate here. We’ve done a lot of events there, smaller events. Events where medical doctors would come together and I would speak about Dallas, Fort Worth, and those kind of opportunities.
It’s fun to see how people’s eyes open up when they’re like, “Oh, really?” Then the next thing that usually they want to do is come here to see it with their own eyes. I don’t do any selling. I just show things, I show opportunities, I connect the dots. That’s really how I see my role, even at Champions. I find where the opportunities are. I find where people are who are looking for opportunities and I try to connect those two dots and just make it happen.
Listen to the entire conversation below, or get a free download of this show and all of the Champions DFW podcasts, on iTunes.
Meet Anderson Schulle and Jim Kelley, here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
