The Mesa Chamber Welcomes David Hrizak of The Streamline Companies

The Mesa Chamber of Commerce Inside Business Podcast brings you a unique view of Mesa through its vibrant business community and the subjects that are important. The podcast is produced in the Mesa Chamber of Commerce Media Studio, sponsored by the University of Phoenix. Our podcast is hosted by Mesa Chamber of Commerce CEO Sally Harrison. Please enjoy this episode of the Mesa Chamber Inside Business Podcast.

Hi, I'm Sally Harrison, President and CEO of the Mesa Chamber of Commerce, and joining me for today's podcast is our friend Dave Rezak, CEO at Streamline Companies. So glad you're here today. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me, Sally, it's great to be here.

I know you have a lot going on, so I'm excited to talk to you today because I don't see you often enough, but I do follow all the stuff that you're doing.

Thank you very much. If I'm not going 100 miles an hour, I'm not happy.

Well, then you should be really happy.

Most of the time I am.

Yeah. Well, so you retired at 49, which is a long time ago. Right. From real estate. What pulled you back into starting Streamline Capital Group? And what's the mission driving you now?

Because I retired at 49 because I had a near death experience and.

Whoa, wait.

Yep.

Don't know about that.

I'm sitting in a Mexican hospital by myself with a collapsed lung after getting thrown off a horse on the beach of Puerto Vallarta.

Oh, my gosh. I had no idea.

Not a lot of people do know.

Well, now we know.

Yeah. So I was on vacation, celebrating my 49th birthday. Get thrown off a horse, can't breathe, collapsed lung, in the hospital for three days with the chest tube.

Oh my gosh.

Doctor says you shouldn't fly for 10 days. I said, well, it's December 8th. At this point, I'm not waiting here and risking missing Christmas. I'm going home. So it was the first time in my life I was truly afraid.

Yeah.

Held my wife's hand for that two hour flight home, landed. I said, I'm done. I'm going to start enjoying my life more at that point. I'd been in my career for 25 or 26 years, did everything I wanted to do, business wise, raised our kids into some great adults and great human beings. My wife just retired from school. I said, we're going to live our lives now. So for the first 10 months of 2022, we traveled. We went everywhere and including three weeks of an amazing trip throughout Europe. And by about October 2022, I started getting a little Bit itchy. I'm missing something in my life. And that's when my current business partner, Scott Roney came up to me. We both serve on the board of directors here for Oakwood Creative Care. And he said, dave, I'm looking for a new challenge. I said, scott, so am I. I want to reinvigorate what I used to enjoy doing the most and that's helping people invest in real estate alongside us.

That's very cool.

I built a nice real estate portfolio for myself and had partners along the way that made a lot of money. And we're celebrating the journey with me. And when I stopped that, I just, I realized I missed that. So we reinvigorated the streamlined companies, which is a vertically integrated organization of three entities. Streamline Capital Group, that is our capital raising company that is helping people invest in real estate as passive investors. We teach them how to diversify their portfolio, reduce their income taxes through the investments that we have to offer.

That's great.

And then Streamline Development is our construction company. We're able to handle all of our own tenant improvements, capital improvements, and then lastly, Streamline asset management. We own our own property management company. So any building that we buy, we take back the property management because we're part owners in those buildings as well. So our property management services are directly aligned with our investors goals. Reducing cost, making more money. And that's what we're doing. And those three entities are working nicely together.

Very cool. That's a great story.

Thank you.

So back to the lung. Everything's good now?

Yeah, yeah, I made it home from that flight and no problems ever since.

Jerry. Oh my gosh. Well, you've chosen to focus on medical office and class B office. Why those asset classes and what do investors need to understand about their stability and upside?

Well, medical is one of the most stable investments out there. They're resistant to the economic factors. People need a doctor whether times are good or times are bad. I've owned a medical building in the chicagoland area since 2009. Remodeled it. It's been fully leased since 2010.

Nice.

That's 15 years of 100% cash flow and great tax benefits as well. So we love to invest in the medical because there's always going to be a need. And here in Arizona, with our population increasing due to new jobs moving in and new corporations coming in, there's a need for increased services. And medical is such a big thing. Here in Arizona, our population continues to age. So those medical buildings are resistant and great for our investments. The class B Buildings. People hear office is bad in the media. Well, what they're hearing about is mostly the class A buildings. The high rises in Chicago, New York, San Francisco. Class B are the smaller buildings that are homes to the small businesses of America. Small businesses of America take up 99% of all businesses in America.

Right, so the small business, no different.

Exactly. Right, yeah. We're sitting in a class B building right now. The Class B buildings offer the diversification for somebody to come in in a small space and grow up into a larger space. When businesses start, they typically start out of their home. And when they're ready for a space, they come into a 500 square foot or a thousand square foot and they're able to grow with us many of the times. And the class B didn't really suffer from the return to office mandate that's happening right now. Yeah, I'm sure they weren't able to send people home for two years and work remotely.

Like the Class A.

Like the Class A, which are struggling. Class A will come back. Our country is one the greatest country in America and we will have big businesses moving and expanding again. But the class B are very stable investments for us. And nobody on our typical rent roll occupies more than 10 to 15% of the building. So if we do happen to lose a tenant, we're not suffering with great vacancy rates.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, so many of your investors are high earning professionals like doctors and athletes, entrepreneurs. What makes your investment model stand out from stocks, REITs and mainstream alternatives?

Well, we're not volatile like the stock market. On April 2, when President Trump declared war on tariffs, the stock market crashed.

Yeah.

On April 2nd, I received income from my rental properties because everybody still paid their rent. When we're helping doctors, attorneys, athletes, entrepreneurs diversify into real estate, they're getting a more stable investment. Plus they're getting tax advantages that are not available in the stock market or in REITs. When you invest with us, you actually own part of the building. So you participate in the depreciation and the tax write offs that go along with owning real estate that you don't get in the equities market or in the REITs.

That's great.

So we're helping reduce their tax burden.

Yeah.

Nobody likes to pay more taxes than they have.

Nobody likes paying taxes, period. Right, exactly.

But we have to pay taxes in order to have the services we need.

Yeah, makes sense. Well, you've built the streamline companies as a vertically integrated firm. How does owning the entire life cycle, from acquisitions to management, benefit your investors?

We Keep everything under one umbrella. And as co owners with our investors, our mission is aligned. So from day one, when we underwrite a property conservatively, we don't underwrite aggressively and promise the sky. If anything I tell my investors I under promise and will over deliver. So when we own it and we manage it and we handle the construction, we're controlling all those costs, thereby making the investment more profitable for our investors.

I think maybe we need to have like a lunch and learn for some of our members that might be interested but hesitant because they may not have a big chunk of money to invest and would maybe be interested if there was a way to kind of get their feet wet in investments because not everybody can start out with that huge, you know, outlay.

Absolutely. And that's one of the great things about Streamlight Capital Group is you come in as a partial owner and as a passive owner so you don't have to take any other time out of your lifestyle to deal with tenants and toilets. We're taking care of that.

Yeah, that's a big plus.

Yeah.

Well, you've mentioned the importance of legacy and I know family is a huge thing to you and impact. How do those values influence your decisions as a leader and as investor?

Wow. I, I wake up every day thanking God that I'm alive. First off.

Yeah.

Secondly, I try and find some quiet time for myself to gear up for the day because whatever I plan for the day, it's not going to go that way. And every my next thing is everything I do in my life is how can I help others, whether it be my family, whether it be the non profit that I'm the board chairman for here in Mesa, Oakwood Creative Care. We love them Shameless Plug for Oakwood.

Not shameless. We love them plug away.

So everything I do, whether it's analyzing a property for my investors, I consider all my investors family. I invite them to become part of the streamline family. Just as I've raised my children with my wife to become great adults and self performing and good human beings. I want to be that for, for my investors as well. And having done this for 29 years now, I built a pretty good track record where my investors follow me through different deals from deal to deal and have been with me for many, many years.

That says a lot about you.

I am who I say I am and I'm not going to apologize for it.

That's good. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. Well, I know that you've got lots of things in the works but one in Particular has caught my attention. It's next to Potato Barn. Can you talk a little bit about the project, the Knox?

Absolutely. It's a great project. I've been working for almost three years on this behind the scenes.

I'm so excited.

So I was fortunate enough to become very good friends with the family that owns the Potato Barn. I was their project manager for the Mesa development and. And also worked on their Goodyear development. And one of their passions in life is to leave something for the community. We have developed the Knox.

That's awesome. Yeah, it's a great passion.

Yeah. We're building this property to be here for a long time for the community. So the Nox. Nox. It's Italian goddess of the night in Italian mythology. Oh, that's what this is based off of.

Okay.

And having worked behind the scenes for three years, we're probably six months away right now from breaking ground. So exciting.

So cool.

So exciting. So the Knox is going to be a 70,000 square foot venue and it's.

Located next to Potato Barn, next to.

The Potato Barn, right off of Ray Road, right by the Mesa Gateway Airport.

70,000 square feet.

70,000 square feet. So it's going to have two different businesses running out of it. It's going to have the theater portion where we'll be able to host comedy shows, music shows, dinner theater if we need to. There's different functions of layouts that we have within the property.

That's great.

Then on the north side of the building, we're going to have recording studios. So there's going to be audio and video production studios so that we can. We'll have a business that they're running podcasts, running recordings for albums, or on the video side, making commercials or making movies. So we're going to have some pretty cool things within that building. What we also think is some of the bands that are coming through or some of the comedy acts, they'll want to film their live shows right here in Mesa, Arizona. We can do it.

That's awesome.

Yeah, we're super excited. We'll be submitting to the city of Mesa for building permits just after the 1st of August.

Okay.

Super excited with our anticipation of breaking ground before the end of this year.

Okay, so how long does it take to build something like that?

Wow. It's pretty intricate. It's going to take 18 months.

Yeah. Okay.

So from the time, it is fast. But we have a great general contractor on hand, We've got a great architect on hand, and we're doing a lot of work behind the scenes to gear up so that once we start, it flows seamlessly and we quote, streamline the process.

That's cool. Any other special things like, like Knox going on that we should talk about?

Boy, besides, besides the Knox, I'm devoting a lot of my other time to Streamline Capital Group, which is raising money and helping investors so that we can buy some more buildings here in the Phoenix Valley.

Cool. Very cool. Well, looking back on your mentors and early lessons, what's a mistake that maybe has shaped you and what, what's a principle now that you maybe lead by, now that you've experienced that?

Well, before I touch on the negative, I want to touch on the positive.

Okay.

So my greatest mentor was my grandmother. She raised me Southside Chicago. My mom was always working, didn't have a father figure in my life. So my work ethic, my loyalty, my dedication was all given to me by my grandmother. And that's why I serve on the Oakwood board, because she died from Alzheimer's. Didn't even know who I was at the end of my life.

Life.

So that gave me a great positive outlook and a hard working work ethic to help me throughout my career. Now, when I was young, I trusted a lot of people I shouldn't have. They took advantage of my loyalty. They took advantage of my ability to. To trust. And it hurt me, but it also helped me grow.

Yeah, learn from those mistakes.

My favorite song in the world is Dream on by Aerosmith. And the line in there is, you have to lose to know how to win. Because anybody that says, oh, that's never happened to me just doesn't have the experience I've lost in my life. I've lost people, I've lost money, but I've always pivoted and I've come out on top because of it. And the goal in my life right now with helping investors learn how to invest, I want to be their mentor. I want them to not have to go through the mistakes that I did. And with 29 years of experience, I can pretty much understand what's going to happen before it happens. So that. And if it does, we pivot. I had to pivot many, many times in my life. Hope I don't have to do it too many more times. But I've been through a lot of cycles through the economy.

Yeah, well, yeah, lots of ups and.

Downs, I'm sure, without a doubt. So becoming a mentor, learning from the people that hurt me is my goal right now. And just becoming a great teacher to.

Help others, that's awesome. So anything we missed? Anything else we should be talking about?

No, I don't think so. We. I love this conversation. It's not even an interview. It's just a talk with friends.

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. So if somebody wants to learn, more or less, come and visit you to really get to know you and understand, you know, your passion for this.

You have a website which is thestreamlinecompanies.com we're located right here in Mesa. I bought a building with an address that's easy to remember.

Yes, it is.

The address is 1234 South Power Road.

Yeah. And it's a great building.

Thank you very much. We've been in there for about a year and a half right now.

Great space.

We're having some great success with 100% occupancy in that building.

Awesome.

After doing some nice remodeling to the exterior.

So that's great.

Also, DJH the streamlined companies.com is my email address. I answer every email myself, whether it be at 6:00am noon or. Or 9:00pm yeah. So I'm readily available to help others and to guide them.

That's awesome. Well, thank you. I appreciate you coming in, Dave. It was a great conversation. I'm looking forward to following more about what you guys are doing because there's so much going on and I just know that you're a good person doing good things, and it's fun to work with you.

Thank you very much, Sally. I appreciate that. That means a lot to me.

This has been a Mesa Chamber of Commerce Inside Business podcast. You can find all podcast episodes at itunes, Spotify, or your own favorite podcast website. You can also find them online@mesachamber.org Content of this podcast is copyright the Mesa Chamber of Commerce unless otherwise noted.