The following interview with Kevin Dean, Founder of the Rockbridge Investment Group, was pulled from Episode 230 of the Apartment Life Leadership Podcast and was edited for length and clarity.
What advice would you give young leaders who are just starting out, as a young leader yourself?
I've learned a few things in my short time as a leader at Rockbridge. The first one that sticks out is being humble in everything I do. I think as a younger leader in real estate, specifically, whether you're on an acquisitions team or you're an asset manager, just recognizing that you don't know everything is one of the best things you can do.
And I think many times you may be working with people who are much older, who have much more experience than you. One of the things I've learned is to ask really good questions, stay humble, and seek counsel from those who have more experience. May people who have 30, 40 years of experience are willing to help you because they may see an aspect of themselves in you.
The second thing that comes to mind is to be ambitious. I think that when you're younger, you have the ability to take more risks in a lot of ways. Whether that means starting a business or taking a riskier position at a company that may not be as established, it'll enable you to learn a lot more. When you’re younger, you have time to recover and do something else if it doesn't work out perfectly.
As a young leader, what are some resources that have been helpful for you?
I'll give you two. The first one is podcasts. When I was first getting out of college and wanting to get into this business, I had a two hour co-hour commute each way every day to work. I would just put podcasts on 2x speed and listen. It was a way to learn about real estate, leadership, anything really.
The second resource is to put yourself in a group of people who know more than you do. I joined a real estate mastermind in DC with a lot of other people who worked in the real estate industry, but in different aspects, and was just able to learn a ton from people who are doing something completely different than me.
Tell us more about what taking a long-term strategy means to you.
Proverbs 13:11 says, “Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but the one who gathers little by little will increase it.” that's something that we think a lot about at Rockbridge. In real estate, there are opportunities to do a deal and make a quick dollar, right? And a lot of times that comes with an elevated sense of risk and also a lot of unknowns. And I think that this verse just really speaks to, okay, do we need to do this deal? Do we need to make this decision?
Or does it make more sense to say no, even if that means we could be missing out on something.
Being younger in this business, we don't need to be the biggest company in the world. We don't need to hit an absolute home run in the next three to five years to be successful, you know, because we're just getting started, and we can afford to take a longer-term approach.
Having that mindset enables us to make better decisions, and it applies to all aspects of the business, whether it's how we structure our deals, how we hire people, the culture that we build, etc.
This idea ties well with Apartment life. When we think about taking a long-term approach in business and in real estate, Apartment Life makes a lot more sense, because you're really investing in the community.
Do you have any practical stories of how this plays out in Rockbridge’s company culture?
One property that illustrates this well is in Lynchburg, Virginia. We've got a guy named Jay, our maintenance supervisor, who has been there for six or seven years and absolutely loves the property.
When we came in, he was afraid that we were going to completely change the property, sell it, and move on. He was looking for another job, and we actually sat down with him and asked him if he would be interested in staying there. He started crying because he loved that property.
He loved the people onsite. And that was a few years ago. He's still onsite, loves the property, and knows every single resident by name. He's now been promoted a couple of times to overseeing multiple assets in the Lynchburg market. Now we're at a point where we just started bringing Apartment Life onto that portfolio.
He's excited to see the community events. But one of the things I'm excited about is for him to get poured into by the Apartment Life Team, because he's typically the one who’s helping everybody else on site, fixing their toilets and fixing leaks and that kind of thing. Having this kind of relationship where he feels cared for is good from a relational standpoint and a business standpoint. It creates stability in the company.
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