Dave Seymour

Dave Seymour emigrated from England at 20, spent years as a firefighter and paramedic in Lynn, Massachusetts, and now runs a real estate private equity firm.

Seymour came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast and Brad opened by admitting he had assumed from the television show that Seymour was a born Boston guy. Seymour carries an American passport now, much to the distress of his 82 year old father, and says he has more Boston in him than the Queen's English. Brad spent fourth through eighth grade in Boston after his own father was transferred, and got in a fight most days that first year because the local kids told him Atlanta had dirt roads and horse and buggies.

Freedom Venture Investments is the private equity side and Legacy Alliance is the education side. He built it with Walter Novicki, his CIO in Florida, after COVID took out his lending business and his live teaching in about 24 hours. Their common ground is knowing what an actual emergency looks like, Seymour from the fire service and Novicki from the military, which leaves everything else as conversation, then solution, then execution. What they buy is workforce housing in the middle market, for the police and firefighters and nurses and landscapers who cannot buy a house at the current price index. They read population growth, rent growth, new hospitals, new airports, and push out into tertiary markets as the secondary ones fill. Investors go in on a 2.2 to 2.5 equity multiple, and Seymour now tells them five to seven years instead of the three to five he would have said before rates moved.

He grew up on an English housing estate where nobody told him he was poor because a football and a patch of grass covered it. His father's advice was work hard, do not lie, cheat or steal, put in a solid eight hours for 40 years, and retire if you are lucky. He got sober in January 1990 at 23. Years later he was running the fire department job, a construction business, and retail security, 127 hours a week, trading his time for other people's money and still losing. The house went into pre foreclosure. He sat in his F-250 covered in concrete dust, broken, with his wife Mary Beth and two young sons at home, and prayed for an answer. He turned the ignition and a WBZ radio ad came on for a free foreclosure seminar. The three day class ended with a $30,000 education package. His credit cards were maxed, so they used hers.

Eight months after that, Mary Beth was able to leave her job as a labor and delivery nurse and stay home with the boys. Getting out cost him inside the firehouse too. In a union of brothers, the second he wanted more he became the guy being asked who he thought he was. He teaches now because of the calls he ran on the other end of a bad retirement plan, difficulty breathing at an old people's place, arriving to find grandma or grandpa dead for three hours because there were not enough staff to look in on them. His oldest son Robert is 30, works at Moody's, and he and his wife Ellie clear over 300 combined and still cannot find a house.