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Master Investor
We did about $40 million in T-shirt sales in 1998,” Lewis says. Itching to do “something different,” Lewis sold his interest in his T-shirt business in 2000 and started Domin- ion Financial Services in 2001 and Dominion Properties soon afterward. Ivy Leaguer BeVier, on the other hand, took the more traditional route and studied real estate at the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. He interned at Dominion while attending Penn. After working in commercial real es- tate for a couple of years after college, he talked to Lewis about rejoining Dominion to handle acquisitions, coming back aboard in 20007. “I went the more traditional school path and didn’t start my own busi- ness, but when I interned at Domin- ion, I really liked that environment and liked kind of the rope that Fred gave me even as an intern,” says BeV- ier, now a partner at Dominion. “I was actually really involved in moving the business forward and making decisions, and so I really kind of fell in love with that environment and en-
joyed it a lot more than a big-business hierarchical structure.”
at this point, so we enjoy it.” BeVier is more of a “deal junkie,” as he likes buying houses and helping other investors buy property as well, “because you can’t buy every single house. It’s a way to be involved in oth- er real estate transactions and work toward other real estate investors’ suc- cess, and I enjoy the personality type of the borrowers that we work with and the business model that they’re doing, so what’s not to like?” he says. COMBINING SUCCESSFUL TRAITS TO HELP INVESTORS Dominion has about 30 houses that it’s buying, renovating and then selling, and this “translates very well in conversations to other investors” who are looking to do the same thing, Lewis says. Both he and BeVier have expertise in different aspects of Dominion’s business, allowing the duo to become more than the sum of their parts. BeVier’s primary responsibility at Dominion is underwriting real estate for its property division to purchase. He
A PRODUCT-DRIVEN APPROACH
Starting a private lending compa- ny after running a successful T-shirt business might not seem like a natural next move, but it made perfect sense to Lewis, who calls himself a “prod- uct-driven guy.” Whether the product is T-shirts or rehabbed houses, Lewis enjoys the challenge of creating something that customers will choose over the com- petition. “What I really enjoy about real estate is it speaks to our creativity as to how we like to renovate houses, making sure we pick the right paint colors and the right design and the right layout,” he says. The explosion of fix-and-flip television shows has created a class of real estate investors “starving for learning those skills,” Lewis says. “They want to know how to do that. It’s something that Jack and I have kind of a deep understanding
“It’s investors to investors,” says Fred Lewis, left, with Jack BeVier.
to investors,” says Lewis, Dominion’s founder and managing partner. Rehabbing and selling homes and private lending are two legs of Dominion’s tripod. The third leg is property management. The firm owns 560 rentals in the Baltimore area, and its management company manages more than 700 houses. “We have a very experienced man- agement arm that’s focused on kind of an owner mentality first,” Lewis says. “The fact that we have the three arms of the business really makes us very well rounded as a company. It really adds to our knowledge base when we’re work- ing with a borrower who’s struggling with management issues or struggling with real estate issues. And on the real estate side, our lending company pro- vides us insights. It’s a very synergistic group of entities; our tripod approach has really been the right way to go.”
The company initially focused on its backyard: Baltimore and the surrounding counties in Maryland and Washington, D.C. In 2011, the company started lending on the East Coast and is now a national lender.
LOAN OPTIONS FOR INVESTORS who rehab and flip houses are pretty straightforward. Private lenders, banks and crowdfunding sites can all be good options, depending on the borrower’s credit and funding needs. But what if there were a funding source that also had a fix-and-flip division in addition to being one of the nation’s top five largest private lenders? There is. Fred Lewis and Jack BeVier of The Dominion Group love to talk plumb- ing and design almost as much as they like to lend money. Their success and unique skill sets make them Think Realty Magazine’s Master Investors for September/October 2016. “We’re investment experts in a sin- gle-family real estate space, so we kind of view ourselves as real estate experts lending money to investors who seek to be experts themselves. It’s investors
ENTREPRENEURSHIP SHOWED EARLY
Pennsylvania native Lewis showed his entrepreneurial chops as a young man by starting a T-shirt company while only a freshman at George Washington University. He steadily built the business through his college years and eventually got into licensed apparel. The money from the T-shirt business helped pay for his schooling. “We got licenses from whatever was the popular culture at the time, and at one point, we were the largest gross- ing T-shirt company in the country.
Bevier, left, and Lewis love to talk design.
20 | think realty magazine september :: october 2016
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