I got into real estate to get rich. I got into property management because I needed a place to live.
The first part came from a book. I was a kid in Section 8 housing who read Nothing Down by Robert Allen and decided I was going to be a millionaire.
That was the dream. The Army came next. I jumped out of perfectly good airplanes. I had seen too many Rambo movies. Two combat tours with the 1st Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Charlie Company, 82nd Airborne, in Operation Just Cause in Panama and Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Gulf. The Army teaches you that plans meet reality fast, and the people who adjust are the ones who make it home.
1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Charlie Company. 82nd Airborne.
The second part came after I got out. I got my license, opened a brokerage, and learned I had no patience for selling houses to people who could not make up their minds. That business failed. So I answered an ad in the paper for a property manager at a 24-unit building in Conyers, Georgia. Class C. It came with an apartment. I took it.
Nobody told me you were not supposed to show units at 11pm on a Sunday, so I did. I cleaned the place up, moved out the people who were not paying, and the building started to work. That was the whole job. Show up, fix what is broken, ask why it broke.
The company kept its books by hand. I had dropped out of high school, but accounting did not look that hard, so I bought a couple of books and put the whole operation on a system called DacEasy. There was nothing easy about DacEasy. We figured it out anyway.
Show up, fix what is broken, ask why it broke.
From there the jobs kept finding me. Controller, then CFO, then Chief Operating Officer of a multifamily company running roughly 23,000 units, about 700 employees, and $350 million in development across 11 states. I learned the business from the bottom of the org chart to the top, which means I know where the money leaks long before it shows up in a report.
Here is one way I learned that. A contractor once told me an entire subfloor had rotted and the fix would run $200,000. Before I signed anything, I put on overalls, grabbed a flashlight, and crawled under the building to look. One beam was bad. The rest was fine. The job came in at $10,000. Contractors over-scope. Engineers over-scope. The cheapest tool I own is a flashlight and the willingness to get dirty.
A few of the properties on the day we bought them. The captions are mine.
Then 2008 arrived and the whole thing went boom. The company I helped run did not survive it. I did.
That stretch taught me more than any good year ever has. I watched how leverage behaves when rents soften, how fast a confident pro forma turns into a margin call, and how the operators who make it through are the ones who respected the downside before they needed to.
So my partner Christian Shields and I started over, smarter the second time. We launched Quantitative Realty Capital out of my basement during the worst of the crash. In 2009 the entire Atlanta market had four sales transactions. We were one of them. Over the next stretch we bought and sold 8,936 apartments and put $233 million into renovations, fixing buildings other people had written off. QRC is winding down now, down to its last asset. Christian and I run Logen Capital together, where I handle underwriting, renovations, and operations, and he handles the capital and the investors. We buy value-add apartments and student housing, mostly across the Southeast.
Between the operating years and the QRC years, I have had a hand in more than 30,000 units. The number matters less to me than the patterns it taught me.
What I actually believe
You respect the market and control what you can. A soft submarket, a wave of new supply, or a sharp move in rates can sink a well-run building, and anyone who tells you a good operator beats a bad market every time has never owned through a downturn. The three things I control are basis, leverage, and operations. I protect the price I pay and I respect the debt I take. Then I run the asset hard.
Most of the underperformance I find is not the market's fault. It is a slow leasing process, the wrong specials, expenses no one is watching, or the most expensive vacant unit in the building that nobody bothered to walk. The market sets the weather. The operator decides how the building sails through it.
I believe in margin of safety the way Graham and Buffett meant it. The price you pay is the one number you fully control, so you protect yourself there first.
I also believe in staying humble about my own judgment, and I keep a prop on my desk to prove it. Years ago I ordered energy-saving motion-sensor lights installed across every unit we owned. No excuses, just do it. We bought the wrong ones. For months, managers at 76 properties were waving their arms in the air to keep the lights from shutting off on them. I pulled one of the fixtures out, set it in a block of plastic, and put it on my desk. When I get sure of myself, I look at it and slow down.
The next decade of this business belongs to operators who understand both the asset and the tools. I spend a lot of my time now on how AI and clearer thinking change the way we underwrite, lease, price, and decide. Not the hype version. If a tool does not make a process measurably faster, shrink a variance, or make a decision better, it is a demo, not a tool.
On the panel at the Builder Innovator Summit.
The writing and the books
I write almost every day. Some of it is about the work directly, capital and finance and leasing and pricing. A lot of it is about the thinking underneath the work, the mental models I lean on, the books that rewired how I operate, and the decisions I have gotten wrong often enough to have an opinion on. Munger, Hormozi, inversion, incentives, second-order thinking.
I wrote a book too, The 5 P's of Property Management, built around People, Pricing, Product, Promotion, and Processes. It is the playbook I wish someone had handed me when I bought my first building. You can read every book about swimming ever written. You still do not know how to swim until you jump in the pool. This one is for the people already in the water with their capital on the line.
I hit my first million by thirty. These days I care less about the big house and the nice car than I used to. I had both. They were not the thing. What I want now is to stay curious, keep asking better questions, and maybe get one other person to do the same.
If you want to talk about a deal, an idea, or a podcast, the fastest way to reach me is a message on LinkedIn.
