The Steinbridge Group: Building a New Real Estate Investment Model

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The Steinbridge Group is a leading real estate investment and asset management company with offices in Philadelphia and New York that acquires, develops and repositions residential and mixed-use properties across transitioning submarkets of America’s growing metros.

The Steinbridge Group prides itself on creating and operating under a new real estate investment model, recognizing the need for single-family housing in gentrifying communities.

Tawan Davis is the Steinbridge Group’s CEO. A seasoned expert in American real estate who earned his MBA in 2006, Tawan Davis was just 15 years old when he first recognized a problem prevalent in many American cities.

Having grown up in Portland, Oregon, Tawan Davis recalls a conversation with his grandmother, when he asked her why everyone else had money and they didn’t. To put this in context, Portland is one of America’s most rapidly gentrifying cities today. Tawan Davis says that ever since, he has been trying to understand the economic gaps in the United States and why large groups of people are systemically financially underprivileged.

Realizing that the answer lies in a lack of access to real estate, Tawan Davis is leading the Steinbridge Group on a mission to invest in single-family homes in gentrifying communities, rebuilding them to a high standard and then offering them to working-class residents at attainable rents. Mr Davis points out that his approach is not only a good investment opportunity but is also in the public good.

Across the United States today, there are around 133 million housing units, 84 million of which are single-family homes. Of those, around 22 million are available to rent, mostly via individual landlords or couples. Many of these private landlords feel under economic pressure themselves, in a rapidly gentrifying community with taxes and costs on the rise.

As Tawan Davis explains, just 2% of these properties are owned by institutional investors, and most of these homes are located in suburban communities. Combined with the fact that more Americans are renting now than at any point in the last 50 years, it was clear to Tawan Davis that there was a market opportunity.

The Steinbridge Group works in a very different way from many real estate investment companies. While an obvious strategy might be to target states with large suburban populations and legislation enabling companies to buy foreclosed properties in bulk, this did not appeal to the Steinbridge Group. A popular investment route among smaller developers is flipping houses, i.e. buying, renovating, and selling homes quickly to make a tidy profit, further inflating house prices in the process. The Steinbridge Group opted against that too.

Instead, the Steinbridge Group devised a long-term plan to invest in rebuilding and maintaining rental properties throughout major East Coast cities. Under Tawan Davis’s stewardship, the company ensures that people who work in and around cities, including teachers, firefighters, and postal workers, can live there, despite falling within a demographic most affected by increasing housing prices. The Steinbridge Group operates with an emphasis on providing working-class families with a quality product, buying houses one-by-one, rebuilding them, and then renting out these high-quality, single-family homes for between $900 and $1,400 per month.

The company’s single-family investment program will see $500 million invested in transitioning urban markets, paving the way for the creation of more than 3,000 homes in major metros across the United States. The Steinbridge Group’s solution to the acute shortage in attainable rental properties is to create more opportunities to enable working-class families to remain in their communities. The Steinbridge Group aims to drive positive economic change at a local level without causing working-class families, many of whom have lived in the community for generations, to be displaced.

Under the leadership of Tawan Davis, the Steinbridge Group focuses on redeveloping single-family homes located in momentum submarkets of growing cities across the United States. After purchasing and rebuilding these properties to a high-quality standard, the company rents them to working-class families at sustainable rents.