For those of you that know me, you would probably agree that I make quick decisions and like to learn by doing. In general, I believe experiential learning, trying and iterating, failing and restarting, beats drawn-out planning and design. My friends in the software world know this as agile (trying, failing, iterating, trying again) vs. waterfall methodology (learn, extended design, implement). I strongly align with agile methodology in how I live my life and approach new ventures.
I have been investing in real estate over the past 10 years, mostly residential and some commercial investments more recently. From flipping houses to buying and holding single family residential to multifamily development and recently hotel development. I’ve learned a lot about various real property investments through actually buying and managing most of these investments myself. Most of these have gone fairly well however I have had some less successful “learning” investments also.
Last year a light went off in my head — I was not optimizing return on my real estate and I felt unorganized and scattered. Technology and automation was not being used to communicate with tenants, I was paying several different property management companies to handle different properties and I had higher vacancy than expected, not to mention the constant stress and elevated heart rate every time the phone rang after 6pm.
Consistent with the way I approach life, I jumped in and started a property management company, Acadia Property Management, along with my friend and long-time employee Stephanne Russell. It occured to me that I needed to streamline the management of the various properties instead of managing each independently. Stephanne has been in charge of guest and tenant relations as well as bookkeeping for several of my properties for the past 5 years and I could not be happier than partnering with her on this venture. Stephanne and I met about 12 years ago at Acadia National Park in Maine – hence the name.
We have been working hard over the past six months to get Acadia Property Management up and running. We have been testing and implementing new software and formalizing processes. We have been fortunate to have a good number of properties (commercial and residential) to onboard and use as guinea pigs while testing and implementing. As of now, we have onboarded and Acadia has been managing all of my properties and we are now ready to introduce Acadia to other property owners, investors and tenants in Fort Worth and surrounding areas.
While I don’t think we are going to revolutionize the Property Management industry, at least not at this point, I do believe we can incrementally improve profits and make owners and tenants lives easier. More to come on how we will do this.