DR. ALBERT LOWRY MILLIONAIRE EDUCATIONAL INNOVATOR By David A. Chodack I had heard of Albert Lowry as a real estate investor - the largest single owner of Federally subsidized Section 8 housing in the city of Oakland California - long before I heard about Dr. Albert Lowry the real estate seminar guru, best-selling offer and educational innovator. This is because Dr. Lowry made his fortune in real estate first, before he began teaching others how to do it. It is typical of. Albert Lowry PhD., that when asked about his success, he starts out talking about his failures, almost as if his achievements were an accident..  The man who has often been credited with creating more millionaires than any one else in the United States is surprisingly modest and humble about it all. However, once he starts talking, what comes out is a fascinating tale of hard work and determination, a classic immigrant success story and then some. Although he does not like to go into the details, Dr. Lowry was raised in an orphanage in Canada, where he was trained as a butcher. As he puts it, they felt that was the limit of his abilities: chopping pork chops and he had no real reason to think he could do any better. He married young and then, like many Canadians, he sought better prospects and warmer weather. When someone offered him a job in Southern California, he packed up his wife and their few belongings and off they went. They got as far as the San Francisco Bay Area and then he made a fateful phone call. He wanted to let his prospective employer know that he was on his way, but they told him not to bother. They had already hired someone else. Not one to be put off by minor setbacks, Dr. Lowry  began looking in the want ads and he found a job almost immediately. As he tells it, his wife started work as a bank teller the next day. Finding work for himself was a more difficult matter. There wasn't much work available for butchers, so he was forced to find another trade. In fact, he got so desperate, that Dr. Lowry was forced to take a job which did not even pay him a salary, just commission. He became a real estate agent.. He might have remained a real estate agent, too if a man had not walked into his office one day and said he wanted to buy a piece of real estate. "Great." said Dr. Lowry. After all, selling real estate was his business and the more real estate he sold, the more money he made. But then he asked the man how much money he had for a down payment and ran into an immediate problem. The man had some crazy idea about buying a property with no money down. Naturally, Dr. Lowry informed him that he could not do that. Even if the Seller was agreeable to such an unusual arrangement, how would he pay the commission? The man looked at Dr. Lowry and said, "Young man, you may know how to sell real estate, but you obviously don't know much about buying it." The man then went on to write up his own offer. He got Dr. Lowry to present it and to Dr. Lowry's amazement, the offer was accepted and he even got his commission. What was even more amazing was that four months later, the same man came back and listed the property at a much higher price. The property sold quickly and Dr. Lowry realized that the man had more money off that one property in four months, than he had made all year off his commissions. Naturally, this caught Dr. Lowry's attention and he became determined to learn all he could about real estate, not just how to sell it, but how to make money.  He began investing in small residential properties in areas where most people did not want to invest. He bought run down, abandoned and foreclosed properties that no one else wanted, fixed them up and then rented or resold them. Before long, he was making more money from his investments than he was from commissions. The income allowed him to fulfill a long held dream and go back to school to finish his education. It also elicited so many questions from others curious about his success, that it led him to become an educator himself. He began doing local seminars teaching others what he had learned. He began doing them on week nights after people had finished their normal workday  and he had finished his investment  activities for the day. He stretched the course out over a period of several weeks, but after a while, he began to see a problem with this. It was hard for people to really learn and retain the material. By the end of the course, they seemed to have forgotten much of what they had learned in the beginning. There was also another problem. He was getting requests from people in other cities and other areas. They had heard about the seminars and wanted Dr. Lowry to come and teach them too, but it was unrealistic to do a six or eight week course out of town. There had to be a better way to do it and gradually Dr. Lowry found it. He created and patented what he called the Immersion Method, where he condensed his eight week course into one two day seminar. Now, students could follow the continuous flow of ideas from beginning to end. Since it was still virtually impossible to remember everything, they  got a comprehensive manual to help them absorb and understand it all. Now it was possible to take the show on the road. He could set up in a city Friday night, do his seminar Saturday and Sunday and be home by Monday and so that's what he did. Soon, the demand was greater than Dr. Lowry could cope with and he began to clone himself, hiring particularly successful graduates of his seminar to teach it to others. Soon, he had several teams in different cities almost every weekend. Soon his success attracted the attention of Simon and Schuster, the world's largest publisher.  His first book How To Become Financially Independent By Investing In Real Estate  was a huge success and he went on to write several more successful books, but typical of Dr. Lowry, he did not even keep any of the money. He was making more than enough from his real estate investments and his growing seminar business,  so he set up a foundation for children on drugs and donated all his royalties.  He also went on to complete his PhD in Business Administration and made many innovations and improvements in his seminar business. He realized that many of the attendees were hungry for specialized knowledge on different aspects of real estate. Since there was only so much he could cram into one seminar, Dr. Lowry began his own publishing operation and wrote books and manuals specifically to be sold at his seminars, rather than in book stores. Dr. Lowry also began offering special one and two day workshops on subjects such as Foreclosures and then finally came up with a totally new seminar format, where audiences got to hear two or three different speakers on different topics and could buy home study courses on any of the subjects they really wanted to learn more about. He also created a network of on-going investment clubs in different cities, to encourage his graduates to get together and network and exchange ideas and solutions to common problems they would encounter. This way, the seminars became an on-going, life-changing force in people's lives, rather than just a one-weekend experience. But what Dr. Lowry is most proud of is his graduates. Many of them have gone on to become wealthy and successful. Many others have been successful in getting a home for themselves, or acquiring a modest amount of investment property. Whether he has really created more millionaires than anyone else is irrelevant. Numbers and titles don't matter to Dr. Lowry.  People do. BACK TO PERSONALITY PROFILES PAGE HOME PAGE