The Origin

I grew up in Texas without any exposure to commercial real estate. Nobody in my family worked in the industry. Nobody I knew talked about buildings, leases, or capital markets. The world I came from did not intersect with the world I would eventually enter.

I found it by accident. I waited tables at a restaurant where real estate professionals came in after work. I listened to how they talked about deals, about neighborhoods, about the way a single building could reshape a block. Something about the scale of it drew me in - the idea that decisions made in a conference room could determine whether a community thrived or disappeared. I did not have the vocabulary for what I was feeling. I just knew I wanted to be in that room.

I moved to New York City with a conviction that commercial real estate was where I belonged. I did not have family in the business. I did not have a network that could open doors. I had a belief, and I was willing to work until the work proved me right.

The Career

I started at the brokerage firms: Colliers, then Cushman & Wakefield, where I learned how deals are made from the outside. How tenants think about space. How brokers build relationships. How markets move. I learned that commercial real estate is, at its core, a relationship business, and that the people who succeed in it are the people who show up consistently, listen carefully, and deliver what they promise.

I then moved to one of New York’s most prominent family real estate firms, where I have focused on commercial leasing across a 13 million square foot portfolio. There, I’ve learned how decisions are made from the inside. How institutional owners allocate capital. How a family that has held Manhattan real estate for over a century thinks about risk, value, and time.

Along the way, I was elected the first Black chairman of the Young Men’s/Women’s Real Estate Association of New York in 2025, one of the city’s oldest real estate organizations, founded in 1948. I also joined the National Board of Directors of Girls Inc., working alongside leaders in capital markets, philanthropy, and public policy. I’ve been recognized by Crain’s New York Business, Commercial Observer, New York Real Estate Journal and CREi for my work in the industry. Each role taught me something different. The chairmanship taught me how to lead an institution. The board taught me how capital and community intersect at the national level. The recognition taught me that visibility without ownership is a ceiling, not a destination.

The Insight

Across Brooklyn, Harlem, Durham, and cities nationwide, thousands of churches and community facilities are deteriorating. The congregations and organizations that built them are often the only significant real property owned by anyone in the community, and many can no longer sustain them. Maintenance costs rise. Membership declines. Tax assessments climb with neighborhood property values.

Some developers approach these congregations or organizations with offers to buy and demolish. The congregation/organization receives a check. The building comes down. Luxury housing goes up. The community loses its anchor - the place where people worshipped, organized, mourned, celebrated, and held each other together for generations. The wealth exits the neighborhood permanently.

The groups who own these facilities do not always want this outcome. They want a different option. But no one is offering one because no one is assembling the tools that already exist in the capital markets to make preservation financially viable. Foundation capital, community development lending, tax credits, public subsidy, institutional equity: every layer of the capital stack needed to reposition these buildings exists. What has been missing is someone willing to bring those layers together, someone who sits at the intersection of institutional capital and community trust.

That is where I sit. Not because I designed it that way. Because my career put me there. A decade of building relationships across every layer of the capital stack, earning the trust of communities that institutional capital cannot access, and learning how institutions think about risk and return. The intersection was not a strategy. It was a consequence of the life I lived.

The Mission

Rockacre Capital exists to prove that preservation and profit are not competing objectives. They are complementary outcomes of a well-structured agreement.

We partner with congregations and community organizations to reposition their buildings into mixed-use developments that preserve the community’s presence, create affordable housing, and generate institutional-quality returns for investors. Churches are not demolished but transformed. The people who built these institutions are not displaced but preserved. Capital serves community, not by concession, but by design.

This is not charity. This is not impact window-dressing. This is a real estate platform built on the conviction that some of the most overlooked assets in America’s cities are also the most valuable - if you know how to see them, and if the communities that own them trust you enough to build together.

They trust us. We intend to earn that trust every day.