Real Estate & Mortgage Owners: The Builders Behind Kent Clothier, Kevin Bupp, Manny Khoshbin and Pace Morby

Joseph Shalaby

Founder and CEO, E Mortgage Capital

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Joseph Shalaby was born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in California in humble beginnings — the son of a man who arrived as an immigrant, worked at a gas station, and kept climbing until he was a licensed physician.

Shalaby graduated from UC Santa Barbara with honors and spent more than twenty years in the mortgage business before building the company he now runs.

He wrote the family playbook down in a bestselling book, Rising from the Sand: An Immigrant’s Path to Wealth & Influence — part memoir, part manual for the next immigrant kid wondering whether the climb is possible.

The company is E Mortgage Capital, and it is not small: a footprint across 47 states, a team of more than 1,200 people, some 900 licensed loan officers, rankings as the nation’s #1 non-delegated lender and a top-five mortgage brokerage. Shalaby also founded the Shalaby Foundation to give back into education and underserved communities.

The gas-station attendant’s son who became a doctor has a son of his own now — and the second generation built a mortgage company on the same lesson the first one taught: start where you are, and do not stop.

Listen Notes / Sharkpreneur — “Episode 1268: Faith, Family and the Future of Mortgage” with Joseph Shalaby
Libsyn / Unconventional Life — Joseph Shalaby episode listing
Listen Notes / The Business — “Joseph Shalaby: Your Guide to Building Wealth”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  John Casmon  ·  Kent Clothier

Kent Clothier

Founder, REI Nation and Real Estate Worldwide

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Kent Clothier’s first empire had nothing to do with houses. He built a grocery-arbitrage business — buying and reselling food inventory at scale — that did, in his words, almost $2 billion a year in revenue over some thirteen years. Then came the run-in with his partners.

He walked out of the company he had built, and over roughly two years he lost everything: millions and millions of dollars, gone, until he was sleeping on his girlfriend’s couch, swimming in his own misery. Most comeback stories start at zero.

His started below it, at thirty-something, with the memory of having run a billion-dollar operation and nothing to show for it.

“Ended up on a couch in my girlfriend’s apartment, kind of swimming in my own misery, if you will.”

In December 2002 he started again in real estate, wholesaling houses in South Florida. In 2006 he founded Real Estate Worldwide, whose education programs have reached more than 60,000 students.

And with his father and brothers he built the family’s REI Nation in Memphis — a turnkey operation that puts roughly 800 properties a year into investors’ hands and manages some 7,500 properties across nine cities.

Clothier teaches his collapse as openly as his success, which is why other investors listen: he is not a man describing a fall he read about.

The Investors Podcast — “REI054: Wholesaling and Turnkey Investing with Kent Clothier”
REI Diamonds — “Reverse Wholesaling with Kent Clothier of REWW”
iVoox / REI Diamonds — “Episode 185: Reverse Wholesaling with Kent Clothier”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Joseph Shalaby  ·  Kevin Bupp

Kevin Bupp

Founder, Sunrise Capital Investors — Clearwater, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Kevin Bupp was tending bar at nineteen when he bought his first property at twenty. By 2007 he held 122 single-family homes across five counties, plus small multifamily properties — a bartender’s-tips empire built one rental at a time. Then 2008 arrived, and it took everything: the portfolio, his primary residence, bank accounts garnished, the works.

The years 2008 to 2011 were, in his telling, pure damage control. What saved him was a lunch. A retired banker named Randy, in Tampa Bay, talked mobile home parks; Bupp listened, and in 2012 he closed on his first park — the asset class everyone else overlooked, bought by a man with nothing left to lose.

“If you could do one thing in life, get incredibly comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

The rebuild became Sunrise Capital Investors. Sunrise has owned more than 50 communities across 18 states; today it holds some 17 to 18 communities and about 3,500 lots, with a portfolio around $400 million, more than $500 million in transactions, and a $100 million Fund IV.

Bupp wrote the book on the second act — The Cash Flow Investor — and teaches the philosophy that carried him from garnished accounts to fund manager: comfort is the trap; the man who lost his own home now provides thousands of them.

Wealth Juice / Simplecast — Kevin Bupp interview
Listen Notes / The Smart Real Estate Coach Podcast — “Episode 527: What $500M in Real Estate Transactions Taught Him,” with Kevin Bupp (Quotables)
Tempo Funding — “Market Challenges and Wealth Building with Mobile Home Parks: Kevin Bupp”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kent Clothier  ·  Liat Arama

Liat Arama

CEO and Co-Founder, Keasy — Bellevue, WA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Liat Arama spent fourteen years as a landlord, building a personal portfolio of more than 150 units — and fourteen years on the wrong end of the property-management industry.

The pattern, as she experienced it, was this: managers made decisions about her properties without her input, and the industry’s percentage-of-rent pricing meant every problem at her properties was revenue for someone else. The conflicts of interest were not a bug in the model; they were the model.

So Arama did the thing frustrated owners usually only talk about: she built the management company she had wished existed.

The company is Keasy, a licensed Washington property-management firm based in Bellevue and serving the Puget Sound region. Its design answers her fourteen years of grievances point by point: a flat fee instead of a percentage of rent, AI-assisted operations to keep costs down, and — the heart of it — the landlord keeps control of the decisions.

Arama now runs the firm as CEO while still owning the kind of portfolio it serves, which keeps her honest in a way she clearly intends: she built Keasy as a customer first.

citybiz — “When Property Management Becomes the Problem: One Landlord’s Solution”
KeyCrew Media via ChineseWire — “Breaking the Property Management Mold: How One Landlord Built the Company She Wished Existed”
Real Estate Today — “Keasy’s Property Management Model Challenging the Status Quo”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Kevin Bupp  ·  Manny Khoshbin

Manny Khoshbin

Founder and CEO, The Khoshbin Company — Orange County, CA

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Manny Khoshbin emigrated from Iran at fourteen with no money, and for a stretch his family lived in their car. He worked odd jobs — one account has him at Kmart earning $3.15 an hour — and he lost his life savings in failed businesses before he ever touched real estate.

Read that sequence again: immigrant teenager, family sleeping in a car, savings wiped out more than once. Khoshbin got his real-estate license in 1992 and started over in the industry that would finally hold still for him, building deal by deal in Orange County.

In 2005 he founded The Khoshbin Company. Its portfolio is now valued in excess of $250 million — some 2.5 million square feet of commercial real estate across seven states.

Khoshbin wrote the story down twice, in Driven and in his Contrarian PlayBook, and built one of the largest inspirational audiences in real estate on the strength of the arc itself: the kid who arrived with nothing and lived in a car now owns the buildings. He tells it without decoration, because it does not need any.

Listen Notes / The Passionate Few — “Manny Khoshbin: How I Made It”
Libsyn / The Passionate Few — Manny Khoshbin episode

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Liat Arama  ·  Maurice Philogene

Maurice Philogene

Co-Founder, Quattro Capital — Washington, DC

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Maurice Philogene’s résumé reads like three men’s. He is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and federal agent. He spent 23 years as a senior executive at a global management-consulting firm.

He served as a senior police officer for a county agency. And alongside all of it — not after it, alongside it — he built a real-estate portfolio: by age thirty he owned 35 single-family homes and had reached financial freedom, working the deals around the uniforms and the day job.

In 2015 he made the switch from houses to multifamily, becoming a founding member and managing partner of Quattro Capital.

Quattro and his other holdings now span apartments and mobile-home communities across eight states. Philogene coaches other investors — particularly the public-service professionals whose path he walked — and has traveled to nearly a hundred countries along the way.

The story the résumé tells is deliberate: a man who spent his life in service careers, to country and county and clients, quietly built his own freedom on the side, thirty-five front doors at a time, and then set about teaching others in uniform how to do the same.

Rod Khleif podcast — “Public Service Agent Does $100 Million in Real Estate” (Maurice Philogene feature)
iVoox / How Did They Do It? Real Estate — Maurice Philogene episodes
Podtail / No BS Apartment Investing — “How Bad Do You Want It: Lifestyle by Design” (Maurice Philogene)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Manny Khoshbin  ·  Omar Khan

Omar Khan

Founder, Boardwalk Wealth — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Omar Khan’s advantage was not a hard-luck story; it was a house where money was discussed in the open. Born in Dubai, he lived in Pakistan and grew up in Toronto, in a family that had run businesses for generations and owned commercial property, mostly back in Pakistan.

Finance was the family language, and Khan spoke it fluently: an honors B.Com in finance from the University of Toronto, a CFA charter, and more than a decade of global investment work, including capital-financing and M&A transactions valued at $3.7 billion.

Where many syndicators on this list started with a duplex, Khan started with an institutional education most operators never get — and then walked away from the desk to build his own firm.

Boardwalk Wealth, based in Dallas, is that firm: a private-equity shop that connects international and Canadian investors with U.S. multifamily real estate, run by a man who has lived on both sides of that border. Khan moved from Canada to Texas to build it.

His pitch to investors is the family inheritance, professionalized — the sophistication about money that his household treated as normal, now packaged for Canadians who want American apartments and want a fellow Canadian, trained at the highest level of the craft, watching the underwriting.

The Everyday Millionaire — “Freedom Through Knowledge” (Omar Khan feature)
Average Joe Finances — “Podcast 122: Boardwalk Wealth with Omar Khan”
Boardwalk Wealth — “Financial Strategist Omar Khan”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Maurice Philogene  ·  Pace Morby

Pace Morby

Founder, SubTo — Phoenix, AZ

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Pace Morby grew up in a family of twelve kids; his father was a contractor who worked two or three jobs. Pace became a contractor himself, and a good one — when Opendoor tested its Phoenix market, he was the first contractor the company ever hired.

He worked for Offerpad and Zillow, too, and built his contracting company to some 250 employees doing $20 to $30 million a year for the iBuyers.

He also worked seven days a week, for years, and somewhere in those weekends the lesson of his childhood inverted: his father, the old contractor, was the one who told him on a phone call what it meant that he was still working weekends. The money was real. So was the trap.

“I was Opendoor’s first contractor they ever hired.”

Morby crossed to the other side of the table. He renovated more than 7,000 properties and built more than 150 new homes along the way, and as an investor he became the country’s loudest evangelist for creative finance — subject-to deals and seller financing that need neither his cash nor his credit.

He owns roughly 130 single-family homes acquired that way, founded the SubTo community to teach the method, co-hosted A&E’s Triple Digit Flip, and by his own company’s account has acquired more than $450 million in real estate through creative financing. The contractor who served the iBuyers ended up teaching a generation how to buy houses without banks at all.

Rod Khleif podcast — “Creative Financing: Single Family vs. Multifamily with Pace Morby”
Anderson Advisors — “Creative Financing Strategies with Pace Morby”
School of Hard Knocks — “His Real Estate Portfolio Is Worth $500 Million” (Pace Morby)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Omar Khan  ·  Perry Zheng

Perry Zheng

Founder and CEO, Cash Flow Portal — Seattle, WA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · X

Perry Zheng had the career a first-generation immigrant family dreams about: software engineer at Amazon and at Twitter, then an engineering manager at Lyft, where he spent five and a half years. On the side, in Seattle, he owned six single-family houses.

But the deeper he went into apartment syndications as an investor, the more he ran into the industry’s dirty secret: the software for raising capital and managing investors was dreadful — spreadsheets, email chains and portals that embarrassed the sponsors using them. Zheng was precisely the person built to fix that, an engineer who was also a customer.

He founded Cash Flow Portal, now a standard piece of syndication software, and stayed an operator while he built it: a lead sponsor on more than 1,020 apartment units, with more than $25 million raised for real-estate projects.

The Lyft engineering manager who moonlighted as a landlord ended up selling the picks and shovels to the entire syndication gold rush — while still swinging one himself.

RE with Reed Goossens — “RG 280: Investing in Real Estate, First-Generation Immigrant Perry Zheng”
Listen Notes / Building Wealth — “From Silicon Valley Engineer” (Perry Zheng)
Buzzsprout — “Episode 292: Alleviating Real Estate Syndication Pain Points with Perry Zheng”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Pace Morby  ·  Reed Goossens

Reed Goossens

Co-Founder, Wildhorn Capital — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram

Reed Goossens arrived in the United States from Australia in 2012 as a structural engineer from Queensland, with no network and — a detail he tells on himself — no idea what a credit score was, because nobody had ever needed to give him one.

Within six months he had bought his first property anyway: a small triplex, all cash, because cash was the only language available to a man with no American credit file. He kept his engineering job for years while the portfolio grew, and only quit the W-2 in 2017, after his green card came through and the buildings could carry him.

“I didn’t know what a credit score was. I didn’t have credit.”

With his partner Andrew Campbell, Goossens co-founded Wildhorn Capital and RSN Property Group, syndicating Texas apartments at scale — about 3,000 doors and some $450 million in assets under management by the count of his podcast bios, with later appearances citing more.

He wrote the book for the next foreigner landing with a suitcase and no credit file, and hosts the interviews he once listened to. The engineer who could not get an American credit card now raises American capital for a living.

Next Level Income — “Ep 69: Growing from a $37,000 Duplex to over 3,000 Units with Reed Goossens”
Rod Khleif podcast — “Reed Goossens, Author: Investing in the US”
The Investors Podcast — “REI030: International Perspectives on US Investing with Reed Goossens”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Perry Zheng  ·  Ricardo Pagan