I grew up around construction. My dad was a contractor, and my first job was sweeping floors on commercial construction sites. I spent more time than I can count watching buildings go up from the inside out. Back then, all I wanted was to be a carpenter when I grew up. I was fascinated by not only the process of building, but with the materials, the tools, and the people that made it all happen. 

I would go on to work in many roles across the construction and real estate industries, from filing paperwork to pulling cable for a fire and security system subcontractor to building loan proposals for development deals. I didn’t realize it at the time, but all of that experience would become critical for my future self as a real estate investor, and those skills now shape the way I think about deals, risk, and building things the right way.

I ended up leaving Arkansas and moved on from the construction world into a career in data analytics and software. However, real estate was never far from my mind. I graduated from grad school with a fresh MBA just about the time the entire market- real estate and otherwise- came crashing down in 2009. I started digging through lists of bank owned real estate for sale, and eventually ended up taking the plunge when a friend of mine asked if I wanted to partner on three rental homes in one of the subdivisions that had gone bust. Like many investors, we did everything ourselves, from managing listings to screening tenants to taking the 3 am maintenance calls.  We learned every lesson the hard way. One opportunity led to another, and before long we were buying land, building spec houses, and working our way into commercial deals. 

We kept things simple because that’s all we knew how to do.  We bought buildings that seemed cheap, fixed them up, and reupped the leases. We had pretty simple criteria- does this cash flow with the debt we’d need to put on it? Can we buy this cheaper than we can build it? And if the current tenants left, would we still be happy to own it? That approach carried us through a lot of decisions. Over time, we began to focus on commercial retail buildings. We bought a few NNN deals, built a few buildings from the ground up, and over the years, our portfolio matured and began to generate real cash flow and profit. That’s when we learned that our next major challenge was maintaining this profitability. We needed to build systems to help us manage our portfolio without requiring hours of work each week. Although we were profitable, we all had full time jobs and we needed systems that helped us be efficient and effective. As any real estate investor will tell you, there really is no such thing as a “passive” real estate deal.

But the part that frustrated me the most was staying organized. I’m a data person by nature, so I tried every system I could think of. Spreadsheets, QuickBooks, Tableau dashboards, Excel macros. Every version helped for a little while, then fell apart as soon as life got busy. State filings slipped. Cash flow timing caught us off guard. Thin deals created pressure points that weren’t obvious until it was too late. I was constantly worried about what was slipping through the cracks. I found myself coming out of pocket more often than I wanted to admit, not because the deals were bad, but because the information was scattered.

Eventually I realized we needed something more formal. Not another spreadsheet. Not another dashboard that required hours of upkeep each month. A simple system that kept everything in one place so nothing slipped through the cracks. We were already halfway to building it for ourselves, and with my background in software, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine turning that internal system into a real product. The timing felt right. More and more tools were opening the door for small teams to build meaningful software, and it was clear that other investors were facing the same problems we were.

That’s how Kestrel started. Not with a pitch deck. Not with a business plan. With years of small frustrations that finally added up to a solution.

Today, success for Kestrel is simple. If we can help real estate investors stay organized, see what’s coming, and make calmer, more informed decisions, then we’re doing our job. We’re keeping the company lean and close to the people who use it. Most of what we build comes from our own experience, but the direction comes from our customers. We want the tool to feel practical and steady. Something you trust. Something you come back to because it makes the long game easier to manage.

Real estate rewards patience and preparation. Kestrel was built for people who understand that. And at its core, it exists for one reason: to give investors a clear picture of their world so they can spend less time scrambling and more time building something that lasts.