Real Estate & Mortgage Owners: The Builders Behind Albert Berriz, Anthony Hsieh, Casey Crawford and Dave Liniger

Albert Berriz

CEO and Co-Owner, McKinley — Ann Arbor, MI

Official links: Website

Albert Berriz was three years old when his family fled Cuba in January 1959, leaving everything behind. His father had lost it all at forty-three, and rebuilt the family’s life the only way he knew how — working more than a hundred hours a week, taking whatever jobs it took to get his children through school.

That example became the engine of Berriz’s own life. Armed with an architecture degree from the University of Miami and an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, he broke into 1970s Wall Street as a minority at a time when those doors were barely open, then carried that same drive into apartments.

As CEO and co-owner of McKinley, he has spent a career acquiring and managing apartment communities on a national scale — more than $10 billion in assets acquired and managed across his career — without ever forgetting the household that taught him what starting over costs.

“He worked more than 100 hours a week at times and took a lot of jobs to get us through school.”

Today McKinley ranks among America’s largest private apartment owners and managers: some 35,000 apartment homes and 55 million square feet under ownership and management, roughly $500 million in annual revenue and about 1,600 employees.

Berriz still tells his father’s story when he explains his own — the refugee kid who watched a man lose everything at forty-three and refuse to stay down, and who decided that homes, the thing his family had lost, were what he would spend his life providing for tens of thousands of other families.

Bisnow — “How 3 of the Country’s Most Successful Hispanic Real Estate Titans Got Their Start”
Multifamily Executive — “Berriz Marries an Old-School Entrepreneurial Formula With Technology”
Washtenaw Community College Economic Club — Albert Berriz biography

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  David Walentas  ·  Andrew Keel

Andrew Keel

Founder, Keel Team — Orlando, FL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Andrew Keel did not inherit a real-estate empire; he cold-called his way into one. He started small, buying single mobile homes inside other people’s parks — the humble “Lonnie deals” of the trade — along with a few single-family rentals and flips financed with hard money.

When he went after his first park, he spoke to twenty banks, and only two were serious about financing the loan.

The park he landed, Quail Run in Edwardsville, Illinois, was a 67-lot community five states from home, found almost by accident: he had called for rent comparisons on another property, and the manager mentioned the owners might sell the Illinois one instead.

He bought it in June 2017, with a partner he had met at a mobile-home-park boot camp contributing sweat equity, and learned to run parks from a distance whether he was ready or not.

That first cold call compounded. Keel Team is now ranked among the Top 50 owners of manufactured housing communities in the country, with more than 3,250 lots under management across more than 50 communities in 15-plus states — a portfolio built by improving under-managed parks, filling vacant lots and billing back utilities, one turnaround at a time.

The investor who had to call twenty banks to find two believers now teaches other people how the math of affordable housing works.

Keel Team — “Interview with Andrew Keel of Keel Team Real Estate Investments”
Casmon Capital / Multifamily Insights — “Deals on Wheels with Andrew Keel” (episode notes)
Hack Your Wealth — “Mobile Home Park Investing Crash Course with Andrew Keel”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Albert Berriz  ·  Anthony Hsieh

Anthony Hsieh

Founder and CEO, loanDepot — Irvine, CA

Official links: Website · Instagram

Anthony Hsieh was eight years old when he became his family’s financial department.

Born in Taiwan, he immigrated to the United States in the early 1970s with his parents and two sisters; his parents had given up comfortable lives back home, his father started over as a grill cook and saved until he could open a store of his own, and because his parents did not speak English, the major financial decisions of the household ran through their young son.

He worked the register at the family liquor store in Long Beach and stayed at his post through three armed robberies — one with a gun held to his head. It is not a typical childhood for a future billionaire. It is, Hsieh has said, one he would not trade.

“You learn early on about self-protection and survival.”

Hsieh founded loanDepot in 2010 and built it into one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in America, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue; the company went public in February 2021, and Hsieh has been listed among Asian-American billionaires.

The boy who learned survival at a liquor-store register built a company whose whole business is the moment his own parents once needed help navigating — a family, a language barrier, and the biggest financial decision of their lives.

WealthManagement — “From Cashier to Mortgage Billionaire: The Rise of Anthony Hsieh”
Market Trading Essentials — “From Cashier to Mortgage Billionaire: The Rise of Anthony Hsieh”
Wikipedia — loanDepot

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Andrew Keel  ·  Casey Crawford

Casey Crawford

Co-Founder and CEO, Movement Mortgage — Charlotte, NC

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Casey Crawford grew up around his father’s True Value hardware store in one of the poorest parts of Washington, D.C., in the years when the city was infamous as the nation’s murder capital. His own home was a stable, blue-collar one; the store was something else.

He went to work with his dad and played with the kids who lived by the shop, and he saw, up close, what poverty does to a childhood — and how much depended on the accident of which side of the street you went home to at night. That witness marked him permanently.

It is the reason a mortgage company exists today whose profits are systematically given away.

“I saw the unbelievable challenges of growing up as a poor youth in an urban context.”

Crawford played tight end at the University of Virginia, earned All-ACC honors, and won a Super Bowl ring with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In 2008 — in the middle of the financial crisis — he co-founded Movement Mortgage in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and grew it into a top-10 national retail lender with more than $30 billion in loan volume.

Through the Movement Foundation, the company has invested more than $260 million in schools, communities and ministries, including Movement Schools, the tuition-free charter schools bringing education into underserved neighborhoods like the ones outside his father’s store.

HousingWire — “Kudos: Why Education Comes Before Mortgages”
National Christian Foundation — “The Impact of a Generous Business: Casey Crawford’s Story”
HousingWire — “Larger Than Life: Casey Crawford at Movement Mortgage”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Anthony Hsieh  ·  Darius Assemi

Darius Assemi

Founder and CEO, Granville Homes — Fresno, CA

Official links: Website

Darius Assemi emigrated from Iran in 1978 and built, from the ground up, one of the Central Valley’s largest private homebuilders.

Granville Homes builds roughly 200 homes a year around Fresno with a staff of about 80 and some $50 million in annual revenue — more than 5,800 houses over four decades, whole neighborhoods of families living in homes his company raised. But ask around Fresno and the houses are only half the story.

In 2006 Assemi created the Granville Home of Hope: the company builds a home, sells lottery tickets for it, and gives the proceeds to charities providing food, shelter and education to local families. In a single year the fundraiser raised more than $500,000.

“At the end of the day, our legacy is how we treat the people around us.”

That sentence is the operating system of the whole enterprise.

The immigrant kid who arrived in 1978 with a new country to learn became the builder who decided that a homebuilding company should be measured partly in homes given away — and that a legacy is not the number of rooftops you sell but the way you treat the people living under them. In Fresno, Granville’s name sits on both.

American Immigration Council — “Iranian Immigrant Builds Homes and Donates Millions in California’s Central Valley”
CASA / Buzzsprout — “Building Hope: A Conversation with the Founder of Granville Home of Hope, Darius Assemi”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Casey Crawford  ·  Dave Liniger

Dave Liniger

Co-Founder and Chairman, RE/MAX — Denver, CO

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram

Dave Liniger grew up on a 40-acre farm in Indiana, dropped out of college, and served in the Air Force in Vietnam. In 1973 he and his wife Gail founded RE/MAX in Denver on an idea the industry thought was crazy: instead of the standard 50/50 split, agents would keep 100 percent of their commissions and pay for support services.

The farm kid’s franchise became a global real-estate institution. Then, in 2012, a staph infection settled along his spine. It turned to MRSA, his organs began to fail, he flatlined, and the infection left him paralyzed; doctors gave him a 5 percent chance of survival.

Liniger was months in hospital, mostly paralyzed — and then he did the thing his whole life had been rehearsal for. He relearned to walk.

He told the story in a memoir, My Next Step, named for the only goal that mattered from a hospital bed. The man who built a worldwide network by betting that people rise when you give them the full value of their work applied the same arithmetic to himself: one step, then the next one.

RE/MAX’s red, white and blue balloon is recognized on every continent; its co-founder’s second act — flatlined, paralyzed, walking again — is recognized by anyone who has ever had to start a body, or a life, over.

Inman — “RE/MAX Founder Publishes Memoir”
RISMedia — “RE/MAX Co-Founder Dave Liniger Recounts the Fight for His Life in New Book”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Darius Assemi  ·  Ellie Perlman

Ellie Perlman

Founder and CEO, Blue Lake Capital — Santa Monica, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Ellie Perlman was born in Israel, the eldest of four children in a poor family, and at nine years old she was already working — cleaning synagogues to help support the household. She married at nineteen and worked three jobs.

What she did next is the part that rewrites the script: she became a real-estate attorney in Israel, leading transactions for the country’s largest development company, then crossed the ocean and earned an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School.

In 2017 she founded Blue Lake Capital in a new country, in a new industry, with nothing behind her but the training she had fought for.

“I started Blue Lake Capital in 2017 with zero investors, zero deals, and zero industry connections.”

Those are her own words, from her firm’s own site — and the zeros did not last. Blue Lake Capital has grown past $1 billion in transactions and more than 4,100 apartment units across the Sun Belt, buying and improving multifamily communities for its investors.

The girl who cleaned synagogues at nine to keep her family afloat now teaches other investors — especially immigrants and women — how syndications work and how to claim a seat at the table she had to build for herself.

Blue Lake Capital — Ellie Perlman’s founder story
Fuel to Fire / Captivate — Ellie Perlman interview
Lisa Hylton — “How to Build and Scale a Successful Syndication Business with Ellie Perlman”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Dave Liniger  ·  Engelo Rumora

Engelo Rumora

Founder, Ohio Cashflow — Toledo, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook

Engelo Rumora quit school at fourteen to chase professional soccer, and by eighteen he was playing it professionally in Australia. Real estate came later — he bought, renovated and sold property back home, building a portfolio Down Under before deciding the real opportunity sat in America’s heartland.

So the “Real Estate Dingo,” as he cheerfully calls himself, moved to Toledo, Ohio, and started over in Midwest rentals: the cheapest houses in the developed world, bought one at a time, fixed up and rented to working families.

“So I quit school at the age of 14 and just completely focused on trying to make it big as a professional soccer player.”

The dropout’s second career outran the first. Rumora has bought, renovated and sold more than 500 properties, with over 1,000 transactions to his name including flips and buy-and-holds; his company Ohio Cashflow has twice made the Inc. 5000 list, and he also runs Oz Realty.

And he is known, in investor circles, for something no spreadsheet explains: giving houses away to people in need. A kid who left school at fourteen to bet on himself crossed the world and built a business whose signature move is handing someone the keys.

BiggerPockets — Episode 89 transcript, Engelo Rumora
BiggerPockets — Engelo Rumora, contributor biography
Baby Boomer / Passive Income Unlocked — “Investing with Purpose with Engelo Rumora”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ellie Perlman  ·  Ernesto Lopez

Ernesto Lopez

Broker, Owner and Founder, UBeHome — Holland, MI

Official links: Website

Ernesto Lopez was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, and raised in Mexico City. At seventeen he migrated to the United States with his family and went to work with his hands — until a back injury ended the physical work and forced a rethink.

While he was buying a home of his own, he found himself signing documents he did not understand. It is a small moment, and it changed everything: a man signing the biggest contract of his life, in a second language, without really knowing what the pages said.

Lopez decided that no family in his community should have to sign blind the way he had.

“Helping somebody understand what they are signing and explaining it in their own language, in Spanish.”

He spent twenty years in the industry and then built the brokerage he had needed: UBeHome — the name a nod to a UB40 song — the only minority-owned real estate company in West Michigan that is fully bilingual. Within a single year, UBeHome climbed from 150th to 19th in its market.

Lopez mentors in the Latino community he serves, and the mission never changed from the day he signed those papers: every client understands every document, in their own language, before the pen touches it.

LAUP (Latin Americans United for Progress) — “Empowering the Hispanic Community Through Real Estate”
West Coast Chamber — Hispano Network profile (PDF)

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Engelo Rumora  ·  Frank Rolfe

Frank Rolfe

Co-Founder, Mobile Home University — Ste. Genevieve, MO

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Frank Rolfe tells the story himself, and it is not a flattering one — which is exactly why it works. His first mobile home park was Glenhaven, in Dallas, Texas: a master-metered property, gas and electric running through the park’s own systems, with a wrestling ring set up in the back.

He bought a business he did not understand, in an industry he had never touched, and then he learned it the slow way — by running it.

He quieted the park down, turned it into a family community people were glad to live in, and about five years later it was worth roughly a million dollars more than he had paid for it.

“When I bought Glenhaven, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or how a mobile home park worked.”

Glenhaven was the first of hundreds. With his partner Dave Reynolds, Rolfe built one of the largest mobile-home-park portfolios in America — ranked as high as fifth-largest in the country, with more than 250 communities across more than 25 states and over $1 billion in parks.

Through Mobile Home University he teaches the trade he once knew nothing about, and his sermons all come back to the Glenhaven lesson: the most overlooked housing in America can be run with dignity, and the man who buys the park nobody wants had better learn to respect the people who live there.

Mobile Home University — About Us (Frank Rolfe’s own account)
My Cash Flow Academy — “Mobile Home Parks: Is It For You? with Frank Rolfe”
Steed Talker — “Frank Rolfe: Mobile Home Park Investing”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ernesto Lopez  ·  Itzhak Ezratti

Itzhak Ezratti

Co-Founder and Chairman, GL Homes — Sunrise, FL

Official links: Website · Instagram · Facebook

Itzhak Ezratti was born in Israel and immigrated to the United States in 1974, landing a job as a bank teller in Washington, D.C. He hated the cold. So he moved to Florida, and in 1976 he co-founded a homebuilding company with his father-in-law, Joseph Hanin.

They named it GL Homes — GL for “Good Luck,” which tells you exactly how much capital and certainty they started with. Their first project was a single duplex in Hollywood, Florida. One duplex.

That is the entire origin story of one of the largest private homebuilders in the state.

Since 1976, GL Homes has built more than 36,000 homes across Florida. When Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida in 1992, the company sold on the order of a thousand homes across the rebuilding years that followed — a builder’s builder, there when the state had to be put back together.

Forbes has estimated the family fortune at about $1.9 billion. Ezratti stepped down as president in 2016 and remains chairman, while his son Misha leads the company — the teller who hated the cold, presiding over a half-century of Florida sunshine, one “good luck” duplex at a time.

GL Homes — “GL Homes Leaders Talk Secrets to Success, Future of Company” (South Florida Business Journal)
GetNews via The Antlers American — “Itzhak Ezratti and GL Homes Mark 50 Years of Excellence in Florida Homebuilding”
BlogyWire — Itzhak Ezratti profile

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Frank Rolfe  ·  Jason Madiedo

Jason Madiedo

CEO and Co-Founder, Panorama Mortgage Group — Las Vegas, NV

Official links: Website

Jason Madiedo’s mother arrived in the United States from Colombia with less than a hundred dollars in her pocket, and built a career in the mortgage business from that nothing — a good life for her family, made one loan at a time.

At eighteen, Jason started in the business alongside her, in Los Angeles, learning the trade at the elbow of the woman who had proven it could be done. When the 2007 crash wrecked the industry, he did what his mother would have done: he started over somewhere new.

He relocated to Las Vegas and founded Alterra Home Loans, aimed squarely at the buyers the industry underserves — Hispanic and first-generation families like his own.

“My mom came here with less than $100 in her pocket.”

Alterra grew into Panorama Mortgage Group, a multibillion-dollar mortgage organization with six brands, now rebranding as SimplyPMG. Madiedo has chaired NAHREP, the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, and The Mortgage Collaborative, and spent three decades in the business his mother entered with two figures in her pocket.

The through-line never changed: the kid who started at eighteen beside his mother built an empire by opening the door of homeownership for families standing exactly where his family once stood.

Hispanic Executive — Jason Madiedo, Panorama Mortgage Group
Hispanic Executive — “Alterra, the Home Loan Fixer-Upper”
MortgageOrb — “Panorama Mortgage Group Rolls Out 1 Percent Down Payment Loan Program”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Itzhak Ezratti  ·  Jefferson Lilly

Jefferson Lilly

Founder, Park Avenue Partners — San Francisco, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Jefferson Lilly had the life Silicon Valley promises: a Wharton MBA, a Penn degree, and nine years in sales leadership at venture-backed tech startups. What he did not have was any faith that the paper wealth around him was real.

So he started buying the least glamorous asset in American real estate — mobile home parks — with his own money, while still working in tech. He spent seven years investing his own capital first, learning the business park by park, before he ever asked anyone else to trust him with theirs.

Along the way he had already co-founded an earlier park partnership, and he started the industry’s first mobile-home-park podcast to teach what he was learning.

“Even then, it was about another year before I left tech and started doing mobile home parks full-time.”

His firm, Park Avenue Partners, is the result: by Lilly’s own count he has cumulatively bought some 43 parks over the years, sold about 22 of them, and today runs roughly 21, mostly across the Midwest — other bios put the portfolio at 25 parks in 13 states worth more than $56 million.

The tech executive who wanted income that could not vanish in a bad quarter built it out of the housing stock his old industry never looked at twice.

Keel Team — “Interview with Jefferson Lilly of Park Avenue Partners”
The Money Advantage — “Mobile Home Park Investing: Jefferson Lilly, Park Avenue Partners”
Goodegg Investments — “Why Mobile Home Parks Are Great Investments with Jefferson Lilly”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jason Madiedo  ·  Jerry Ascencio

Jerry Ascencio

Broker and Owner, San Fernando Realty — San Fernando, CA

Official links: Website

Jerry Ascencio was born in Michoacán, Mexico. When his father’s visa application was declined, his father paid a “coyote” to bring the family north — and young Jerry was left with strangers in Tijuana, separated from his family for a week before they were reunited. In California the family lived in a trailer.

Jerry worked three jobs, played in mariachi groups, completed the eighth grade, and at fifteen was sent back to Mexico for two years. That is the whole foundation: a boy handed to strangers at the border, an education that stopped at eighth grade, a trailer for a home.

Everything else in this profile is what he built on top of it.

“This is not just the Jerry Ascencio story. It’s the story of every immigrant.”

Ascencio came back, got into real estate, and built San Fernando Realty into a multimillion-dollar brokerage managing some sixty employees; he also owns Mission Realty REO. He rose to national chairman and president of NAHREP, the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

And then he did something no other broker on this list has done: he turned his own life into a one-man stage show, 53 Million & One, performing the trailer, the border and the mariachi years in front of live audiences — because, as he says, it was never only his story.

NAHREP — “Real Estate Broker Jerry Ascencio Takes His Stories of Latino Struggles to the Stage”
RISMedia — Jerry Ascencio feature
RD Mobile — Jerry Ascencio, speaker biography

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jefferson Lilly  ·  John Casmon

John Casmon

Founder, Casmon Capital Group — Cincinnati, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

John Casmon had the safe career — a Fortune 100 marketing executive working on General Motors’ advertising. Then GM went through bankruptcy. He landed at an ad agency; the agency went through bankruptcy too.

Laid off twice, with the message delivered plainly that no employer was ever coming to save him, Casmon built his own plan B in the most hands-on way available: he house-hacked a Chicago duplex in North Center, putting 3.5 percent down with an FHA loan and living in one side. Then a three-unit.

Then an eight-unit building bought with every dollar of his personal savings. He was tapped out, twice-fired, and out of cash — which is precisely when he learned the skill that changed everything: raising other people’s capital.

“We ended up going through a structured bankruptcy, but that was really the first time I realized that I could not rely solely on a W2 job.”

The pivot became Casmon Capital Group.

Casmon moved from duplexes bought with his own savings to multifamily syndications, and has now invested in more than $145 million of multifamily real estate; he hosts the Multifamily Insights podcast, teaching the same ladder he climbed — duplex, small building, syndication — to professionals still sitting in the W-2 chair he was pushed out of.

Two employers died on him. The third enterprise was his, and it cannot go bankrupt out from under him the same way.

The Raise Report — “From Bankruptcy to $145M in Multifamily: How John Casmon Learned to Raise Capital the Hard Way”
REI Lvest — John Casmon interview: multifamily syndications and capital raising
Listen Notes / First Worst Best — “John Casmon on Failing”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Jerry Ascencio  ·  Joseph Shalaby