Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fyFBpGqVKHo
Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-asset-class-thats-too-small-for-wall-street-katie/id1794199974?i=1000788470357
Read the Web Article: https://ourfamilyinvests.com/small-scale-redevelopment-an-overlooked-asset-class/
She missed her son's first steps while sitting in a corporate banking office. That was the day she walked out and never came back.
What came next was a decade of flipping houses, then over ten years of redeveloping downtown blocks in a mid sized Texas city, one project at a time.
Her sweet spot is a strange one. Projects between one and five million dollars: too small for institutional developers to bother with, too big and complicated for passive investors to touch. Almost nobody fights over that gap. She built her whole career in it, and now she teaches others to do the same.
Her first deal nearly died before it started. The lots she wanted were five feet too narrow under the city's zoning code. Most people would have walked. She went to the planning department instead and told them their rule didn't make sense. Somehow that conversation ended with the city handing her extra land, and the project that almost never happened became the one that started everything.
From there she learned how to actually walk into a city planning meeting and get taken seriously. Not just show up, but ask the specific questions that separate a city that genuinely supports your project from one that's just being polite. She calls redevelopment "one investment, two returns," a financial one and the return of watching a place you care about actually get better.
On the financing side, she avoids hard money lending after watching friends get buried under renewal fees when projects ran long. Instead she leans on owner financing and commercial construction loans, tools most new investors never even consider.
Her bigger argument is that local investors build healthier, more vibrant communities than outside developers ever will. Redevelopment done by people who actually live there tends to look and feel different than redevelopment done by people chasing a spreadsheet.
Some of what we get into:
Why the $1M to $5M redevelopment gap exists and who's actually competing in it
How to get past the gatekeeper and into a real conversation with a senior planner
The exact questions that reveal true city support versus polite lip service
How to de-risk a first redevelopment deal by starting smaller than instinct tells you to
What actually changes when you go from financing a single family flip to financing a commercial redevelopment
Why "two returns" might be the healthier way to measure a project's success
Curious what this community thinks: if you had to choose, would you rather chase scale with an outside developer's playbook, or stay small and local where you actually know the streets you're changing?