When I first started working with Montecito, we met in a Starbucks coffee shop because they didn’t even have an office. They were just seven people that owned apartment buildings for rentals in the US, but they had never actually sold residential real estate.

At our first meeting we talked about their vision to create a company that would repackage and remarket these rental apartment units into condominiums. This process is called a condo conversion.

We were able, from that Starbucks coffee shop, to grow that business in excess of $1 billion in our first calendar year together. In 30 months, we sold $2.5 billion worth of condos, and Montecito became the second-largest developer in North America.