Envelope Stuffer to CEO
PIP Group’s Charles Sells’ Real Estate Journey
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
When Charles Sells, founder and CEO of Platinum Investment Properties (PIP) Group looks back on how he got started in real estate, he proudly admits he started at the very bottom of the ladder. “In my early 20s, I took a part-time job at a company investing in tax liens stuffing envelopes for $10 an hour,” he recalled. Today, nearly two decades later, tax liens and other creative investment strategies are the key to PIP Group’s consistent delivery of high-performance assets and reliable returns to hundreds of loyal real estate investor-clients.
“At the start, I literally fell into the job with the tax-lien company as a side-gig to earn extra money when I wasn’t bartending,” Sells said. “I had always been interested in real estate. When I finally got the chance to be involved with it, I fell in love with it—permanently.” He quickly rose through the company, becoming a real estate manager before striking out on his own with just four clients and about $4,000 to his name. “I used every penny for legal agreements and other paperwork to form PIP Group,” he said. “Today, we have managed more than $180 million in tax liens, fund oversight roles, private loans, and fix-and-flips.”
While he was falling in love with real estate, Sells also fell in love with his future wife, Lena. At the time, she was working for a competitor. Sells hired her away, “and then I fell in love,” he admitted. “She is the smartest person I ever met. She speaks four languages fluently [and] essentially runs the show now.” The two share two children, and Sells also has two sons from a previous marriage.
The Right Pace for the Right Time
Although Charles and Lena run PIP Group together today, Sells started out with another partner, Don Fullman. “I had the trust of my existing clients, but with most investors having a median age over 50, not many potential clients are willing to listen to a 26-year-old kid just getting started. So, I finally decided I needed a figurehead to be the face of the business—somebody older, more experienced with life to be the front man,” said Sells.
Although Fullman retired from the company years ago, Sells never forgets one of his old partner’s favorite axioms. It has gotten the company through tough markets, competitive markets, and volatile ones by helping company’s leadership stay focused on what matters: getting good deals done for clients.
“Don would say, ‘You’re trying to do too much, too fast,’” Sells said. “I was a young self-starter, and I wanted to do everything. I wanted to be in all the states, be invested in commercial and multifamily, you name it and I wanted to do it.” Fullman’s advice kept the new CEO focused when PIP Group had one of its biggest growth surges in the history of the company in 2009. “Business tripled nearly overnight. It probably would have killed a less-prepared company,” Sells said. Fortunately, PIP Group stayed focused on the end goal, going above and beyond for clients. “Whatever responsibility we have to our clients, we try to go about 10 steps further,” Sells explained. “We want to always do what is right, not just what is required.”
In 2009, that meant leveling with clients about what the company could (and could not) do for them in one of the most opportunity-laden markets the country had seen in years. As the housing crash sent home prices spiraling downward, many of PIP Group’s clients were eager to dive into new markets and try out new acquisition strategies. “We were honest. We told them to avoid pie-in-the-sky dreams and provided reliable, trustworthy information about how we were investing and what kinds of returns we were seeing,” Sells said. The result was that the company experienced exponential growth and did not fall into the quagmire of customer-service meltdowns that plagued many investment firms during the early part of that decade.
Of course, not every client was able to hold steady during the early 2010s. Thanks to these determined individuals who refused to look at hard data and preferred quicksilver action that sometimes failed to pay off, Sells also learned the importance of not just having hard data to support a purchase but also of being able to communicate that data to others and put his own skin (or Lena’s) in the game when necessary. “I have seen literally thousands of incredible opportunities slip by because an investor wants to ‘follow their gut’ rather than take advantage of our years of experience investing in real estate,” Sells said. “The biggest profits are nearly always going to be in the average-looking properties rather than the ones that look like ‘home runs.’ But you have to be able to communicate that or your client may get caught up in the excitement and completely disregard your experience and knowledge.”
PIP Group communicates with investors about ongoing projects and potential deals using simple, straightforward methodology that helps clients measure risk and maintain realistic expectations. Sometimes, those expectations need to be tempered. Other times, both Sells may believe investor expectations are falling short of where they should be. Charles Sells recalled a time in 2019 when Lena elected to build a deck that had been quoted by a local professional as being a $20,000 job. Lena felt the timeframe (three weeks) and the cost were both too high. She was determined to prove her expectations for the budget and timeline of the project were closer than the contractor’s. Lena dug the postholes and laid the deck-boards in four days, proving the inefficiency of the service provider the client had planned on using. “PIP’s lead executives are not afraid to get their hands dirty and make sure the job is done right,” Sells explained proudly.
Offering a Hand Up to Others
Sells has come a long way from his beginnings with $4,000 for legal paperwork and $22,000 in capital. The boutique firm now boasts dozens of clients and millions of dollars in capital under management. However, Sells said, his biggest achievement may not necessarily be the reliable, double-digit returns he prides himself on generating for his investors. It might be something much, much bigger.
“Several years ago, we wanted to take the next step as investors and start helping people become homeowners,” Sells said. “We wanted to make homeownership a reality for many people who may have thought that part of the American dream was forever out of their reach.” PIP Group developed the HOPE Program in response to this need. HOPE stands for Home Ownership Preparation Experience, and the program involves a collaboration between PIP Group and a credit counseling program. HOPE homebuyers are able to leverage a combination of credit optimization, owner financing, and credit counseling to create enough equity and build enough credit to purchase a home after between three and five years in the program in most cases.
Sells describes the HOPE program as a way to enlighten real estate investors about the types of communities that can benefit most from the industry while also creating “one of the most rewarding transactions you will ever make, financially or personally”. He added, “When you see how you can change somebody’s life (and profit from it), you will be addicted to this style of investing just like I am.”
Sidebar:
A Firm Foundation
When Sells first started in real estate, he “got his feet wet” in tax lien investing. This strategy is still foundation in PIP Group’s portfolio today. However, there are many different types of tax lien investing, something most real estate investors do not realize. And, of course, over the years, Sells has added some unique twists and tricks of his own.
“Tax liens are an idea asset for passive investors because there are so many ways in which you can generate returns,” Sells said. “Almost every real estate strategy and real estate investor’s risk appetite can be accommodated in some form in this asset class.”
PIP Group leverages tax lien acquisitions in multiple ways, including:
- Tax lien investments. These investments are made based on the conservative, high-yield returns the investor receives upon redemption or repayment of the tax lien itself. PIP Group serves investors with this focus by working in states where redemption laws are longer, relatively less aggressive, and offer high annual yields.
- Tax lien foreclosures. Many foreclosure investors get their start with tax lien foreclosures, and Sells believes this is a strategy that may be extremely refined for an individual investor’s goals. PIP Group focuses on properties and states here the odds of acquiring the deed to a property after purchase of the tax lien (or tax deed certificate) are extremely good. Once the investor has acquired the property, PIP Group advisors will help them determine what strategy to deploy next. They may wish to fix-and-flip or rehab-to-rent properties acquired in this manner.
- Secondary market tax lien foreclosures. One of the great things about working with a boutique firm with decades of experience and a client list to match, Sells said, is that you get pioneering concepts like the secondary market tax lien foreclosure. If an investor interested in the yields associated with redemption of the property finds the property is trending toward a foreclosure, they have the option to sell to an investor seeking tax lien foreclosures. The tax lien investor gets the reliable returns they hoped for, and the tax lien foreclosure investor does not have to spend time waiting to take a property into foreclosure.
