Real estate agent, property manager, property investor, landlord, personal fitness trainer and business owner, Louie Morrison ‘02 is the kind of guy who goes all-in on whatever he does — often on multiple projects simultaneously.
He credits the solid education and personal attention he received as a business administration major at Husson as one of the reasons he’s found success.
“I had a professor and mentor at Husson who, on the first day of Business 101, told us, ‘The business of business is business,’” Morrison said. “At the time we were all like ‘well, of course – it’s so obvious.’”
Over the course of that class and throughout his time at Husson, Morrison recognized the true wisdom behind those words.
Morrison started working as a fitness trainer even before graduating from Husson. He trained members of the women’s basketball team after Coach Kissy Walker spotted him working with other students in the campus’ fitness center, he said.
“I remember he spoke well and he looked the part,” Walker recalls. “He looked like someone who was into fitness [and] he spoke like he was really passionate about it.”
After graduating, Morrison spent the next 10 years working with clients at Union Street Gym. In 2012, he opened his own gym — LA Training in Bangor.
The Columbia Street facility now houses three floors of fitness equipment where members can workout on their own or with one of the half-dozen personal trainers who rent space there.
But Morrison didn’t want to just be a trainer.
“The investment world really had that business mindset,” he said. “All these folks I was training that had their own businesses had one thing in common – they all owned investment properties.”
In 2009, he purchased his first duplex as an investment property to rent.
“Starting with that duplex was pretty cool,” Morrison said. “You are providing homes for people and making a little extra income for yourself.”
He continued to invest in properties over the years. He now owns more than 300 units across Bangor including nine downtown buildings. He and a partner also own several commercial properties, leasing space to organizations like Beal University and Northern Light.
All of that has led him to his most recent project: an ambitious tiny home community in Bangor that he and a partner are developing at the former Martel mobile home park on Hammond Street. When completed, each 320-square-foot tiny home will have a 96-square-foot attached porch sitting on a roughly 1,400-square-foot lot with a backyard and one parking space.
This, he said, is a way to help address Bangor’s critical housing shortage. It’s also about keeping a sense of community.
“This is going to be a neighborhood of single-family houses,” Morrison said. “I see it as the kind of place you can lock up your house and leave for a day or five years and it will be fine [because] you have neighbors keeping an eye on things for you.”
Morrison and his partner broke ground last summer and have completed 20 of the homes so far.
“It’s about [housing] for people,” he said. “How can I put as many roofs over as many heads as possible in – for me most importantly – the shortest amount of time.”
Rent for the tiny homes will include water and sewage with residents responsible only for the cost of heating or cooling their tiny home with the installed heat pumps.
“These units are energy efficient as hell,” Morrison said. “From the studies we have done, it will be such a minimal electricity price residents will pay.”
He’s already had more than 200 applications for the planned 34 units and it’s breaking his heart knowing he’s going to have to say no to more than 160 of those applicants.
“If I could build 10,000 of these tiny homes, [I would],” Morrison said.
For Morrison, this project isn’t about the money. It’s about people.
Morrison used that people-first approach with the nine residents who lived at the old trailer park at the time of purchase.
The residents were all offered solutions including a year of free rent at one of Morrison’s other rental units, relocating their mobile home at Morrison’s expense or purchasing a new mobile home (also at Morrison’s expense).
“I did not want to be one of those people who bought property and kicked people out,” he said. “This is not about money, this is how we can make true changes.”
The whole idea behind the project, Morrison said, is providing safe, clean and affordable housing.
It’s a human-to-human ethos that came from those classroom lectures and out of class discussions with Husson faculty and staff.