Ramel Newerls came back to Baltimore to feed 500 families at Lexington Market

On Saturday, Oct. 24, entrepreneur Ramel Newerls fed 500 Baltimore families at Lexington Market. He partnered with Sunnyside Café, inside the market, to serve free meals from noon to 2 p.m.

The planned menu, WMAR-2 News reported ahead of the event, included hot honey chicken biscuits, fish on a bun, banana pudding and Pop-Tarts, with fresh juices from Rich Juice Bar, another Black-owned business.

Newerls, who has roots in Baltimore, told WMAR that showing up in person was what mattered most to him. With the holidays coming, he said, a free meal could help people who are struggling, out of work or waiting on their next check hold on to hope. "I am nothing without the community," he said.

Baltimore was one stop on a trip Newerls has been making from city to city to invest in small businesses and give back to their communities.

The day meant something to the café, too. Co-owner Kristian Knight-Miller told WMAR that a fire destroyed Sunnyside in 2020 and that support from Baltimoreans helped the business rebuild. Knight-Miller called the giveaway a chance to give that love back.

From welfare to ownership

Newerls was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up on welfare, according to the biography in his new book. He got his start in real estate by fixing and flipping houses, beginning with a Brooklyn brownstone, and kept buying single-family homes and duplexes until he had about 40 residential properties.

Then the pandemic hit. With an eviction ban in place and many tenants out of work, his rentals stopped paying for themselves. On the Self Storage Podcast, he said he had plenty of equity in those years but very little cash flow.

The way out came from a tenant who was moving and needed a place to keep his things. Every storage facility they checked was sold out, and Newerls started studying the business. After six months of following up with one owner, he bought his first self-storage portfolio, three locations in the Pittsburgh area, talking the price down from $1 million to $850,000. Storage became his main focus.

Buying instead of building

In September he published The Boring Business Revolution, a guide to buying existing, profitable businesses such as self-storage facilities, laundromats, mailbox stores and car washes. The publisher's biography says he owns seven businesses and more than 500 self-storage units and has completed over $10 million in business transactions.

Much of his work is teaching. He told Shoutout Atlanta that he is proudest of helping more than 150 people get access to business credit and start investing in real estate. On the podcast, he credited mentors and steady follow-up with sellers for most of his growth.

Illuminate Baltimore caught up with Newerls at Lexington Market on Saturday for a video interview about his work and why he keeps coming back to give.