Angela Yee has been involved in the entertainment industry for over two decades, and she has more than 20 years to go at the pace she is going!
She moved to radio after getting her start with the infamous Wu-Tang Clan. She has worked with the likes of Paul Rosenberg, Cipha Sounds at Sirius Radio, and of course, with Charlamagne the God and DJ Envy at Power 105 while hosting her radio show and podcast.
The Radio Hall of Fame inductee (2020) is now back hosting her own radio show, Way Up with Angela Yee, and has been a budding entrepreneur for years. Her partnership with Airbnb hints at her moves in real estate. Yee recently closed a deal on a residential building in Detroit’s Midtown area and will give 10 of the apartments to formerly incarcerated women.
BLACK ENTERPRISE spoke to the successful entrepreneur to discuss her current partnership with Airbnb.
The radio host purchased some property in the Catskills in 2022 for her first Airbnb. It has seven bedrooms, and time was taken to make the place comfortable enough that Yee would also stay there. The amenities include a dipping pool and a Jacuzzi. The first test was allowing her friends to stay there to get honest feedback before allowing it to be opened to the public.
“It did take some time for me to get the Airbnb to the space where I felt like, ‘OK, I’m comfortable with people coming here because we also care about reviews.’ I didn’t want to put my property and list it without feeling comfortable knowing that it was as up-to-par as possible. And then I had a couple of my friends go up and stay and test it out and give me some feedback on what they thought, ’cause it is a luxury property, and so I just wanted to make sure.
“So now that I have this one under my belt, I think the next one I’ll probably do would be on an island somewhere.”
Yee also is all about female empowerment and entrepreneurship. She typically gets involved in a way where she can pass that experience on to others in a “do what I do” mindset. Yee likes to “take the leap. And lead by example so that I can give you a more educated from an experience standpoint of, ‘OK, these are some of the things that I had to do. You know, make sure you know to do this, make sure you know to do that.’ I never want to tell somebody to take a risk that I wouldn’t take myself.”
The Detroit property was handled by an all-women team, for example.
“I feel like sometimes we feel discouraged when it comes to investing in things like Airbnb and investing in properties,” Yee explained. “Maybe because we don’t know the proper steps to take, and some people do. And it does take some research, and it definitely takes some time for you to get it together the way that you need to. So for me, I wanted to do it so that I could be like, ‘OK, here’s what I did. Here are some tips that I can give you to make things a little smoother for you,’ and so that’s why I really wanted to make sure that I did it first. And then when you show people, look, I did this, it makes people feel like, ‘Oh my God, I can do this.'”
Yee initially got into real estate when she purchased her first home in Brooklyn, NY. After realizing she was able to take this on as a business, she bought several properties in Detroit and has been able to successfully flip them to her advantage.
But why Detroit?
“I was in Vegas, at the iHeart Festival, and there was this whole thing on television about investing in Detroit and why it’s a great idea and paying attention to what’s going on in the neighborhoods and doing your research. When you see the Pistons came back downtown, you see there’s a Google headquarters there. You see Stock X, you see Quicken Loans, you see Rocket Mortgage. You see everything that’s happening in the city, and then it makes you feel like, ‘OK, I see all this movement, and I see that there’s opportunity there, and I see that the economy is growing in this city. That’s a great place to invest.'”
With the vision and aspiration to be better at what she does, the entrepreneur’s business and real estate portfolio is definitely “Way Up with Angela Yee.”