The TreppWire Podcast: value-add, development and Opportunity Zones

I joined Lonnie Hendry and Hailey Keen on The TreppWire Podcast, Trepp’s commercial real estate show. Trepp’s listeners are mostly lenders, servicers and CMBS investors, so it was fun to tell our story to the debt side of the business.

We covered a lot of ground:

• Starting as a mortgage broker. I started arranging loans in 2005, and the financial crisis hit a couple of years later. A mentor told me to stick it out so I’d be there for the start of the next cycle.
• Gut renovations. Why we take old buildings down to the studs instead of doing counters and paint. Expenses go down, rents go up, and we never have to play hot potato.
• Opportunity Zones. How we became OZ investors by accident, how the program works, and why making it permanent means wealth managers now have to learn it.
• The Savoy Operating System. Seth started building our own tools in Microsoft Power Apps about ten years ago. With Claude Code we pulled the data from our software into one dashboard, with an accountability layer on top: if a task doesn’t get done, it goes to the person’s boss.
• Paris, Texas. A building that sat empty for about ten years, where the brick and the foundation are about all that stays.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thanks to Lonnie, Hailey and Preston Hodges for having me.