Laurence J.

I recently joined BiggerPockets as Chief Growth Officer, where I lead Product and Engineering. That means there's a good chance I'm now helping build the very platform you're reading this on — and I came to it not as an outsider, but as a member and investor who's been part of this community for years. I'm a Chicago-based buy-and-hold investor, and just as importantly, I'm a builder of tools for people who do what I do. Everything I own is small multifamily right here in Chicago — a collection of two-to-four-unit buildings I've acquired over the years, many of them alongside my dad and uncle. It's a genuine family operation: I run the properties with my wife Christine and my father, who handles maintenance. In fifteen-plus years, we've never once hired a professional property manager. If it needed doing, one of us did it (or we built software to do it). That last part is really my story. Self-managing our units is what pushed me to co-found Avail back in 2012 — the landlord software a lot of you probably know, built for exactly the independent, do-it-yourself investor this community is full of. Since then I've kept scratching my own itches, including a property-management system I built for our own portfolio because nothing off the shelf fit how we operate. My path here was a winding one: born and raised in South Africa, came to the U.S. as a kid, started out in finance (consulting, then Goldman) chasing the idea of financial independence I very much did not have at the time. Real estate and building products are how I actually got there. I'm most interested in the operations side of this business — the unglamorous stuff that actually determines whether a deal works: tenant screening, maintenance systems, self-management at small scale, and using technology to run a portfolio lean. Always happy to swap notes with other Chicago investors or anyone figuring out how to manage their own units. Reach out anytime. Coming to BiggerPockets in this role is the most natural move I've ever made. My job is to make this platform genuinely more useful to you — better tools, better data, fewer reasons to ever leave the ecosystem to get something done. And I don't take that as an abstract exercise: I'm building for me, my dad, and the tens of thousands of you running your portfolios the same hands-on way we do. So if there's something here you wish worked better, reach out. Feedback from real investors is the most valuable thing I can get, and my door is open.