story by Dennis Arp
image by Jeanine Hill
Race car or battleship? That may well have been the first real estate decision faced by Kurt Tiedt '85 and Rob Rissi '85 back when the childhood pals sharpened their property-trading skills around a worn Monopoly board in their Placentia neighborhood.
From there, Tiedt (B.A. business administration-finance) and Rissi (B.A. business administration-marketing) rolled doubles on their mutual dream of becoming real estate moguls, a dream as rewarding as anything they might have imagined.
If moguls grill burgers and shoot baskets with the residents of their apartment complexes, if they take pride in helping to rid neighborhoods of gangs and crime, and if they talk as much about relationships as financial success, then Tiedt and Rissi qualify.
"We could have been more aggressive," Tiedt said, "but we wouldn't have made as many friends and we wouldn't have been able to share as much of our success."
Not that they haven't succeeded. Tiedt and Rissi's investment group owns and/or manages about 70 properties, down from more than 100 during the height of the California real estate boom. It's just that they take as much pride as profit in helping to rebuild distressed Inland Empire neighborhoods.
Tiedt and Rissi, both 42, opened their real estate brokerage in Corona in 1995. Rissi was one of six Cal State Fullerton friends Tiedt had recruited as a vice president at Home Savings, so it seemed natural to call their new venture Titan Real Estate and Investment.
Both men were active students in college and wanted to remember their alma mater in their daily business lives, thus the name.
The investment and property management side of their business has proved especially lucrative, with income from rents and management fees alone outstripping the partners' previous earnings as lending executives. Now the pair are gearing up to offer seminars on their syndicating techniques and how to "turn around distressed neighborhoods and make profits in the process," Tiedt said.
"People sometimes ask us to buy a particular property, because they know we'll improve it," he added. "That's a source of great satisfaction."
