ANTHONY NG

North Texas Property Owner

Mr. Ng has been a landlord and real estate agent for property owners across North Texas since 2002. He manages 200 single-family homes across East Dallas, Forney, Ft. Worth, Allen, McKinney, Plano and North Dallas. He’s been so successful at managing his affordable housing portfolio that he started focusing on real estate full-time two years ago after leaving his career as an engineer at Texas Instruments.

He first learned about the Housing Choice Voucher program seven years ago when he was approached by a prospective tenant. He had only heard negative things about the program, but he felt the prospective tenant was a good person and wanted to give her a chance. He studied the program, vetted the tenant, and ultimately rented a home to her. To this day, she’s still a great tenant. He credits her with opening his eyes to the opportunity to help the community while building a solid residential real estate business.

Anthony says, “I pursued creating affordable housing options for our clients because when I weighed the pros and cons, the pros outweighed the cons by a mile. I appreciate the automatic and timely payments, the clear policies and guidelines for both tenants and landlords, as well as the resources housing agencies provide to help ensure a mutually beneficial situation for landlords and voucher families.”

Of the 200 single-family homes that Mr. Ng manages, 190 of his homes are rented to voucher families and 100 of those are DHA clients. He credits the success of his portfolio to some key lessons he learned along the way:

• Respectfulness. Be sure to work with your voucher families and to understand their needs. If you listen to them, are patient with their circumstances and show them respect, then you put yourself in a better position to find them the right home and earn their trust.
• Resources. DHA provides great resources such as the landlord services team, inspectors and case workers – leverage them. I work closely with all housing agency resources to help run my business and maintain positive relationships with my tenants. If all follow the rules, communicate and use the resources we’re provided then people can find great homes to live in and landlords can develop a good business, too.
• Be Fair. As landlords providing affordable housing, it’s important that we understand two key concepts: affordability and rent reasonableness. We all know about the affordable housing crisis across North Texas and it’s important to understand that everyone has a different level of affordability. If you want the business benefits of renting to voucher families, you should have reasonable rents. We should all look to be reasonable and fair. I’ve established a great business using this approach and you can, too.

Mr. Ng’s closing thoughts: “Affordable housing is an important part of any healthy, modern society. We will always have different income levels in every community and subsidized housing helps balance the economy. The families we work with are always appreciative of the opportunity to live in our safe, clean homes. We hope our families aren’t with us forever. We hope we’re giving them a chance to hit the ‘reset’ button and become independent of us.”

We are so inspired by Mr. Ng’s business and his leadership. The relationships he has established with property owners and tenants makes him a great business partner. And most importantly, thank you Mr. Ng for all you do to help ensure safe, clean affordable housing is made available for our families. We appreciate your leadership!