Starting as a small woman-owned business 23 years ago in Dallas, First Preston HT has become a well respected leader in the real estate industry.  Our company’s reputation is based on exemplary services and intelligent technologies, a unique combination that has resulted in the sale of over 400,000 properties.  Through two decades of changing economic cycles, we continue to create innovative solutions to achieve the best outcomes for clients with large portfolios of real estate assets.

Our history is remarkable in many ways.  We began in 1988 when our visionary founder and owner, Nancy T. Richards, defied conventional wisdom and started a real estate company.  She recognized the need for an asset management firm to service single family residential portfolios and small commercial properties.  With a business plan to secure 700 assets in the first year, she launched First Preston, and ended the year with over 7,000 properties in inventory.  Today the company manages 35,000 assets annually, directing a vendor network of 7,500 listing brokers, appraisers and property management professionals.

In 1990, the company launched an innovative home rental management business, working with several Fortune 500 companies to manage and lease homes of executives transferred to international assignments. It provides solutions with bottom line advantages to companies by avoiding home purchases and an option for employees to have their home managed and leased, if they prefer not to sell. We expanded our relocation business to include managing large portfolios of rental homes for investors. Over 14,600 rental properties across the U.S. have been managed by First Preston HT as part of our rental management business.

In 1994, we identified the federal government as an emerging asset management opportunity as it began to outsource property management services.  Selected initially to service rural areas in East and West Texas, we developed a network of local vendors, trained to client specifications.   Our business model, which includes thousands of local businesses delivering valuations, marketing and property management services, has been expanded across the country and recognized by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation as a best practice in entrepreneurial development.  We choose to use local businesses that share our company values -  responsive, pioneering, impactful, fearless and honor-driven contributors to their clients and communities.

In 1999 First Preston organized hundreds of small, diverse-owned businesses across the U.S. leading the charge to win the first large privatization contracts for federal portfolios.  The teaming model was in use by our company long before others in the industry recognized supplier diversity as a benefit.  Within nine months of winning these government contracts, First Preston assumed additional federal portfolio contracts and became one of the largest privatization contracts for the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, managing and selling as many as 40,000 properties annually.

Recognizing the need for better solutions for managing large portfolio volumes and an electronic marketplace with offer management functionality, we launched our technology company in 2001. Among the visionary real estate technologies created  by our company are:

• HomeTracker®, the first online, end to end workflow and asset management system for the REO industry, currently utilized by 45,000 vendors in the industry;
• BIdSelect®, the first combination of an online marketplace with customized offer management workflow used to sell 200,000 properties and  to generate and review more than a million offers;
• LenderCenter®, the first electronic property preservation solution in use now by 50 financial institutions managing three million government-insured properties.