Market Deep Dive: Houston TX w/ Susan Davenport

In this episode, Tom Speaks with Susan Davenport, the Chief Economic Officer for the Greater Houston Partnership, about the economic, educational and cultural aspects of the City of Houston.   --- Transcription   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On today's episode, we have Susan Davenport, who is the Chief Economic Officer for the Greater Houston Partnership. And on this episode, we're going to deep dive into Houston, talk about points of interest, talk about the economy, and all that good stuff. All right, let's do it.   Theme Song   Tom: Before we get going and talking about Houston, Susan, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, as well as the Greater Houston partnership?   Susan: Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you again, Tom, for having me this afternoon. Again, my name is Susan Davenport. I'm the chief Economic Development Officer for the Greater Houston Partnership. And we are the region's lead business organization. We serve a 12 County Greater Houston region that represents our membership base represents more than 1000 businesses and institutions throughout Greater Houston in that regional effort. Our members, the member companies that are part of our organization account for about one fifth of Houston's workforce.   So we have many large corporations as well as small and medium sized enterprises as well. So we have three areas of focus. One is to promote economic development and trade. The second is to advocate for effective public policy. And then the third is that we convene regional businesses and Houstonians on key issues affecting our region. Now, the Greater Houston partnership is an organization that has its roots and founding actually from 1840. We were the Houston Chamber of Commerce, was founded again in 1840. And then in 1989, there was a merger with what was founded following the Chamber's initiation in 1840, there was the World Trade Center of Houston and international leadership entity in regard to international business and trade, and then the Economic Development Council of Houston.   And so all three of those entities in 1989, joined under one umbrella organization, the Greater Houston partnership, and that's very indicative of the type of activity you see within our organization, again, having about 1000 member businesses and institutions that speaks to our chamber side, right. And our chamber roots, my team, which does economic development, and international investment and trade that harkens back to both the Economic Development Council as well as the World Trade Center activities. And really from an international standpoint, the Greater Houston partnership is really the the region's front door for international investment and trade, and work in connection with the city and other entities throughout the region that undertake pieces of that both from the transportation side airports, ports, a movement of goods and services, all of those things, exporting would would fall under a network of entities. But we really are the largest business organization. And so we have access to all of those entities within our region.   Tom: Very cool. Very cool. So just kind of curious, like is a lot of the day to day like working with companies that are like looking to move into Houston or existing companies that are in that I'd love yeah. Susan: Yeah, my favorite question. We talk a lot about economic development. It's a multi faceted, a scope of work, as you can imagine. But we really look at new business recruitment. And we look at that globally. And I want to spend a little time to talk about global in just a moment. But we really are do global outreach, we do new business recruitment, we also work extensively with our regional businesses on the ground, focusing especially on our members, obviously, but really are working on behalf of the entire business community. And so entities could say business retention, and perhaps expansion opportunities there.   And the