Creating Built-to-Rent Communities: Jason Hassenstab’s Winning Strategies

Michael Stansbury (00:00.169)
Hello everybody and welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Michael Stansbury. Well, actually, me pause there, Jason, because the one thing I always do, and I never did it, is I make sure I pronounce your last name right. Give it to me. See, I was gonna murder that one. Hassenstab . Okay. I was gonna go stab, but we’re gonna go Hassenstab . Hassenstab . Okay.

Jason Hassenstab (00:15.956)
Ha ha. Haasenstab.

Jason Hassenstab (00:21.696)
Yeah, I’m used to it.

Jason Hassenstab (00:28.78)
How’s this stuff?

Michael Stansbury (00:29.693)
Haas and Stubb in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Michael Stansbury. Folks, I’ve got a special guest from Houston, Texas, Jason Hassenstab. Jason, how are you, Great, sir. We’re going to get into your story and find out what you’re doing, all the fun you’re having there in Texas in just a minute. But first, we’ve got to do this for Investor Fuel. At Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs 2 to 5x their businesses.

Jason Hassenstab (00:42.85)
doing well, sir. How are you?

Michael Stansbury (00:59.239)
and allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted also to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. So Jason, before we get into what we’re doing here in 2025, tell me your origin story. How did you get involved in development, construction, real estate? Did you make a pivot or has this always been the thing?

Jason Hassenstab (01:16.983)
No, good question. So my upbringing was in Omaha, Nebraska.

I was born and raised there. Still got most of my family in the either Omaha, Nebraska or Nebraska area. And so I grew up in the construction business. My dad and mom ran a concrete construction business. Most of my childhood, they started that business back in 1988. I was born in 84. And so even as a young child, even as a baby, my dad had already started kind of doing like the nights

and weekends outside of the day job, getting the business to a point where he could go full force into it, which ended up being in 1988. And even prior to that, my dad grew up in the business. My grandfather started out in the union as a carpenter and was ultimately 40, 50 years in the business and eventually became a salaried.

project manager for one of the local contractors in the Omaha metro area. And so, generationally, being in the construction and being part of development is…

was in my blood. was something that I loved doing even as a kid, going out to job sites with my dad, even, know, really some of my earliest memories, four or five years old, going out on the weekends with my dad to check in on jobs and see how things were going. And my brother likes to joke I was just playing around in dirt piles, which there was definitely some of that going on as a little boy, but I was definitely absorbing. And even at that young of an age, like I knew this is, I wanted to

Jason Hassenstab (03:00.88)
to be involved in this in some form or fashion.

As I got older, I also was recognizing that both sets of my grandparents were involved in real estate. On my dad’s side, they had a lot of single family rentals, largely in the neighborhood that they lived in or the area that they lived in. And on the other side, my grandparents were buying and selling land in Florida. And to be honest with you, I just thought it was cool. I didn’t have any concept beyond that. I was just like, that’s cool that they’re doing that. I don’t, you know, I didn’t have any real understanding.

of it then. And so now for me it’s a blend of the things that I grew up just seeing and witnessing and so construction along with real estate in combination. I guess when you look at those components it makes sense that I landed where I am thus far. But coming out of high school I started college to get an engineering degree and

And I coincidentally, I applied for an internship with the company that my dad actually worked for when I was born.

And this is after my freshman year of college. I didn’t technically expect to get the internship because it was so early in my college career at that point. But I did the interview and the gentleman I interviewed with had a similar background. Like he grew up in a family construction business and so hit it off. I had a good interview. I got the internship and I ended up working for that company, Keywood, for almost 14 years from

Jason Hassenstab (04:46.096)
turned up through project management and loved working for the company and loved the work I was doing, largely doing infrastructure. was largely roadways, power plants, wastewater plants, anything having to do with the infrastructure that we all use and underappreciate every day because we don’t really do that. But it’s all very critical to the comfort that most of us enjoy day to day.

Michael Stansbury (05:07.439)
Underappreciate, yes.

Jason Hassenstab (05:16.086)
So back in 2016, my now wife but girlfriend at the time, we left that kind of corporate environment.

with the intent to do this thing on our own. And by then we had gone from Nebraska, California, Hawaii, and we decided to land in Texas. And we haven’t looked back. mean, we hit the ground running. Initially we did some small investing on some single family, some flips, and fairly quickly, I mean, in my head I was always going to kind of move back towards that infrastructure

land development stuff that I had been really exposed to growing up as well as working for for QBIT for many years. So it started with kind of gradually, you know, moving up into doing infill projects, you know, one, four, six, 10, 12 units. And we do continue to do that. And then we we’ve expanded even more so and really a heavier focus is in the land development components.

Maybe the obvious is that that’s.

largely where I like to play, that’s what I enjoy the most. And even the entitlement process is not, it’s not for the faint of heart for anybody, but I enjoy it. it’s, you know, and so I think that’s a tremendous value that we can bring to any group is navigating those waters and certainly the local politics that come along with navigating those waters. So a lot of the stuff we do

Jason Hassenstab (06:58.576)
are not always well received, especially in a lot of the smaller and rapidly growing Texas markets. A lot of these smaller towns, they don’t exactly want that growth that’s coming their way. And so those are waters we have to continue to navigate.

Michael Stansbury (07:18.17)
And so, the entitlement process and so are you somebody that gets those land leads or those people that with the land come to you and say, hey, can you help me with this project? How are you marketing yourself and getting to do those kind of ventures? What does that look like on a, know, just maybe you take the last two or three or choose your own adventure on that. But just to give an example for our audience, like this is, you know, this is, this is what an entitlement is. This is how I got the lead.

Jason Hassenstab (07:35.138)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (07:46.854)
And this is the fun we’re having with the city of blankety blank and making sure the boomers are okay with what we’re doing.

Jason Hassenstab (07:48.814)
Yeah.

So the leads are coming in a variety of ways. Largely we do work with with brokers on a lot of the stuff that that we do. The land brokers in and around both Houston, Dallas. Those are the main markets that we’re that we’re focusing in. Now.

Now, having said that, there’s been a handful of projects where we chased the lead internally. And I wouldn’t say it is any magic formula by any means, but it was, hey, one of my business partners, take a look at this one. This is kind of interesting. And I think, you know, didn’t really.

To be honest with you, just brush it off. Sometimes that happens. You look at it like, eh, that doesn’t look like there’s anything gonna be there. And one of our grand, I mean, literally grand slam projects that we have going right now is in McGregor, Texas. And that’s how that one started. He saw it on a…

on a Facebook page. I remember exactly what I have, it a Facebook page through an investor network that we’re part of locally in Texas. he obviously saw something and he sent it me. was like,

Jason Hassenstab (09:12.546)
I don’t really see much there. You know, lo and behold, we did dig deeper. I’m glad we did connected with the gentleman that had initially found it. And really that gentleman was a broker and now he’s a partner in the deal. Fantastic guy, but he found it because it was just a stagnant listing up on the MLS that had been hanging out for over a year and wasn’t getting any traction. And he started working it. And then we got involved three or four months.

later and we’ll actually start delivering lots here in the next few weeks on that one. So yeah, that one is a single family lot development. So that one’s going to be 107 single family lots that are 60 foot on the front by 120 foot depth. So 72 underscore foot lots.

Michael Stansbury (09:49.148)
Yeah, what is the end product that’s going to go in McGregor?

Michael Stansbury (10:05.736)
And what will the, are they for individual owners or is these for, or are you selling a home builder or how does that?

Jason Hassenstab (10:12.408)
Yeah, good question. We’re selling to a home builder. So we’ve already got a home builder on that one, Stylecraft, fantastic home builder out of College Station, Bryan area. And yeah, they’re committed to buying all those lots and we’ll deliver over basically a two year delivery period over time.

Michael Stansbury (10:14.524)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (10:31.432)
That’s exciting, I love it. And I love it, and I love the fact that you didn’t bury the lead there. Well, it may turn out to be something, and then you dig a little deeper and you find out that once you get somebody else, I always say this, once you get fresh eyes on it, then maybe the idea starts to spur. I have a buddy of mine, lives in, I live in Memphis, he lives in Jackson, Tennessee, it’s a small town about 50 miles east of Memphis.

And he owns a gym, owns like a 24 hour fitness gym, it’s standalone building, right? But he also owns all the acreage behind it. And we’re going over there one day, he also flips houses, and I kinda taught him how to flip houses, and he does it in Jackson. I said, hey, are you, I said, Matt, what are you doing with all this property back here? He goes, man, what’s your idea here? I go, dude, self storage. I said, look, there’s nothing here.

Jason Hassenstab (11:02.638)
Okay.

Jason Hassenstab (11:22.925)
Yep.

Michael Stansbury (11:24.584)
There’s a lot of commercial activity. There’s no self-storage. so, lo and behold, two years later, we’ve got a big self-storage facility there. And it was, I saw that it could go there. And then we partnered with somebody that saw the same thing, did the due diligence, saw that there was a need for like over 200,000 square feet in that area. And it was just, you know, but again, he was like, I don’t know what to do with this.

Jason Hassenstab (11:41.774)
Yep.

Jason Hassenstab (11:49.164)
That’s a great thing. He just had all that lamp.

Michael Stansbury (11:53.011)
just had all that land. that’s where it all starts. Well, I love the origin story. And what gets me excited, too, about your story is my sons are growing up in the real estate business, and they kind of know it. They know enough because they’ve been around it.

And there’s some things that you probably knew because you just know things, you’ve been around it. And obviously there’s things that you learned by being with Kiwi. You learn exactly how to deal with all the bureaucracy that you need to deal with in order to get the deals done. And man, doesn’t that hamstring most people, they just get, I don’t want to deal with that. So yeah, how do you sell those jobs? How do you sell those entitlements? What’s your secret?

Jason Hassenstab (12:32.365)
it does.

Jason Hassenstab (12:40.782)
Well, I would say to be to be fair there’s those ones where you just follow the path, right? You don’t try to get cute or creative with it, you know in this case even even the example of McGregor You know, it was zoned for what we’re doing. So we didn’t try to deviate with any kind of different, you know Zoning that that is within the McGregor criteria. We just stuck to the plan on that one now

The bigger question is, is how do you navigate the waters when you’re attempting to get a rezone or you’re attempting to particularly downsize the lots in some of these smaller markets? That can be getting a little bit, get a little hairy. But I think really it’s illustrating to…

the local powers that be. And each of them is a little bit different, typically you’re going to go through a planning and zoning committee. That’s for the most part, that’s.

they don’t do much because at end of the day, even if you get approval from planning and zoning, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get approval from council. So you can come out with a win from planning and zoning, you go to council and you’re still not going to get your final approval. So it’s almost ceremonial when you go to planning and zoning. It’s not that it doesn’t help or it can’t give you a boost, but at end of the day, if you’re coming in with a rezone or some kind of variance, council in a city particularly is where it’s going to live.

die. And you know we’re experiencing that right now, we’ve experienced in the past, but the main thing is is education largely.

Jason Hassenstab (14:25.74)
getting council to understand, you know, here’s the demographics in your city or in your location, and here’s the income levels, here’s the jobs. I mean, those are, it’s really just presenting those data points and helping them understand that, you know, this is what.

This is what the market is dictating to us, what we see and what the folks that we work with see and helping them understand that that’s the reason for either the rezone or the variance or a combination thereof both.

and helping them kind of along with here’s the vision of where this is going. So here’s the growth metrics we see. And I would also note that a lot of that is a team effort even with the folks that are at the cities and the counties that you’re working in too because

The council may not always be as in tune with exactly what those metrics are until you share that with them and you help educate them. They may not know. so in some cases, you’re working with the city staff and you’re working together to help educate the folks that ultimately can make or break your ability to do the project that you’re trying to do. And granted, you’re gonna…

Michael Stansbury (15:44.166)
Yeah.

Jason Hassenstab (15:47.586)
you’re gonna get sometimes that opposition and the folks, and by right, they have that opportunity to come speak and say what they feel, what they think. I just encourage anybody. Most people don’t wanna take that step. That’s largely my role in our business. I do a lot of that. So I’ve gotten yelled at and called nasty names and stuff, but.

But you got to, you know, I do tend to be somewhat empathetic to that. Whether I agree with it or not is I get it. I’m coming in, I’m proposing to do something. It’s going to disturb their way of life in some way. They’re not always going to be too thrilled about it. So you just got to roll with the punches on those.

Michael Stansbury (16:19.9)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (16:31.176)
Yeah, it seems like you have the cadence to be able to deal with that. I know you probably hear it from people like, oh, well, you know, why can’t things stay the way they are? I feel like that that is one of the things I’m noticing about our little small towns in Memphis is that there’s some change over in the leadership and they’re getting younger, which is, I think, good for good for getting deals done because, you know, just folks like the sometimes the way that things always been. And it’s hard to get people to change.

Jason Hassenstab (16:53.219)
Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (17:00.124)
But again, kind of what you said is, you know, educating, going shoulder to shoulder with the people at the city to make sure, hey, you know, and getting them some buy-in because they’re ultimately going to be communicating this to the Alderman, the city council, or the planning development to, and if you can get them, if you can hook them, you know, then it may be able, a good buffer against, you know, Joe, homeowner that, you know, hates your guts.

So Jason, I heard in here that your wife works with you in the business, this is a family business, what’s the layout look like?

Jason Hassenstab (17:27.266)
That’s right.

Jason Hassenstab (17:37.282)
Yeah, she definitely was super involved in the early years when we started this back in 2016. More recently, she’s taken a step back. have two young daughters, one’s just seven months and the other one’s three. So she’s taking more of a mommy role in life.

Michael Stansbury (17:57.863)
Okay, wait, seven months and three months or three years? Because I have to do the math.

Jason Hassenstab (18:00.91)
Three years, yeah, three years. So we got a three year old and a little seven month old. So two little girls.

Michael Stansbury (18:05.254)
Yeah buddy, that’s beautiful. So right now you’re doing development, are you doing any other real estate investing besides land development right now? Are you still fixing and flipping, still buying stuff? You’re just focused on this? This is good.

Jason Hassenstab (18:18.904)
No.

No, we are everything we are doing is tied into into new development. A couple things we are certainly still doing. The land development component is really the foundational strategy, but we are also doing a built to rent single family communities as well as doing co-living. So we are involved in a couple of pad split is really one of the ones that we’re we’re focusing.

on the co-living side from a platform perspective. So we’re also doing a couple of those new developments as well. So those are more the infill product that we’ve done in the past.

Michael Stansbury (19:01.512)
Gotcha. so with some of these, you partner with people and some of these are 100 % yours. So it’s one of those things where you’re, you know, one of the things people are always leery when you say partner or, you know, cause how much control does one partner have? How do you navigate those waters when you have different projects going on? What does that, what does that look like? Or, you know, maybe give us a couple of parameters that you have in.

Jason Hassenstab (19:06.392)
course.

Michael Stansbury (19:29.604)
and going into partnership with you guys.

Jason Hassenstab (19:33.014)
Yeah, so you’re right. mean, everything we have done and continue to do largely does have a variety of partners, some the same across projects, some different. But I think that can always be a bit of a tricky thing to navigate. when you’re looking at introducing new partners, think, and you’re always learning, but your first priority should be to identify

where everybody provides their best strength to the team and what value they’re gonna bring and what they’re gonna focus on. And really identifying that early on, we made some mistakes in the past and…

and certainly not perfect in that regard, but I think starting with a good foundation of, right, here’s the things that I’m focusing on, the roles, the responsibilities, is pretty crucial from the very beginning. And it also helps you navigate through the process a lot cleaner when that happens, as long as everybody’s kind of staying in their lane. And then from a communication perspective,

There’s no scientific formula there. We do weekly check-ins, same day, same time. Sometimes those check-ins are a couple minutes long. Sometimes they’re 30 minutes long. But there’s a consistency to it and it kind of keeps everybody on track as well.

Michael Stansbury (21:09.394)
So yeah, schedule time to kind of deal with any kind of issues that are brought up and figuring out like where we are in the project. Well, Jason, so what do you do besides land development, besides this outside of real estate? You got two kids there in Texas. What are things you do for fun? What are your hobbies? Do you have any except for land development? Sometimes people are like, all I do is real estate right now.

Jason Hassenstab (21:35.169)
Lately,

And that would be my response. mean, right now it’s been super heavily involved, really, since we started this. We haven’t traveled near as much in recent years as we have in the past. We’ve been all over the world, but certainly not in recent years. So traveling is definitely something we really enjoy doing.

maybe another year or two, we’ll get some breathing room and get to do a little bit more traveling. That’s definitely top of the list, but I like to golf. I don’t golf as much as I want to. I like to hunt. I don’t get to hunt as often as I’d like to. So there’s, lately it’s been a lot of just real estate, land development, and of course the girls.

Michael Stansbury (22:07.378)
Have you?

Same. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (22:20.84)
three-year-old and seven-month-old. That’s it. Yeah.

Jason Hassenstab (22:24.086)
And I like exposing them to the terms and taking them out to the projects and stuff too. So in that one, a few of our subdivisions are named after them. So we’ll continue to do that as we do more projects too.

Michael Stansbury (22:31.254)
yeah, that’s money.

Michael Stansbury (22:35.858)
That’s great.

Michael Stansbury (22:39.846)
Yeah, that’s a household legacy. I love it. That is really cool.

Jason Hassenstab (22:46.08)
And exercise is something that I do make a point. So that is something I enjoy doing. So I don’t get a gulf or hunt near as often as I’d like to, but I do definitely get my exercising in.

Michael Stansbury (22:57.34)
Yep, awesome. So Omaha, Nebraska, it’s a big week this week. They got the College World Series. Did you partake in that when you lived there? Did you go to the College World Series? Absolutely.

Jason Hassenstab (23:05.568)
Of course, of course. Yeah, it was, I went a lot when when the old Rosenblatt Stadium still still was standing. So I’ve technically not been to the College World Series since it moved and Rosenblatt has been torn down, which is I mean, that’s been over 10 years now and something like that. So yeah, but yeah, I used to love going to the College World Series game going around growing up.

Michael Stansbury (23:24.402)
Yep.

Michael Stansbury (23:29.436)
That’s a I’ve never been the Arkansas Razorbacks, which is my team is in and so I’m contemplating next week if we do well to go to a couple games. We’ll see what happens. I gotta go. I know.

Jason Hassenstab (23:39.886)
You should. You absolutely should. It’s an experience. It’s a good time.

Michael Stansbury (23:45.895)
Yeah, yeah, it’s, and I’ve never been to Omaha, Nebraska, be the first time. Well, Jason, if, somebody wants to get in touch with you, where can they find you on the internet? What does that look like if they say, Hey, you know what? I’ve got a little deal close to that town. You never know who you’re going to, who’s going to be listening to this. And, and maybe they have some property that they’d love to get entitled and do some fun stuff with. How can they get in touch with you?

Jason Hassenstab (24:07.862)
So you can definitely go to our website, elevateddevelopment.co.co. not.com and they can certainly reach out directly to me at jason at elevateddevelopment.co.

Those are the best ways to get a hold of me directly. And yeah, we can help people navigate those waters from anywhere in any area. So are we familiar with the Texas markets? Because that’s where we are, of course. But we can certainly help people in other markets, even outside of Texas, if that’s your work. Of course.

Michael Stansbury (24:42.062)
Okay, so Tennessee and Arkansas and so any yeah any any I guess any state in the union if you’re willing to go there. But have you just done single family have you done some you will you just talked about you did some co-living spaces and you’re doing some build a rent and and so we did talk about residential side of it you guys also doing commercial stuff like a like a contractor garages or self storage or regular strip malls.

Jason Hassenstab (24:49.784)
Great.

Jason Hassenstab (25:03.351)
Yeah.

Yeah, we’ve got a office condo project that we’re building right now. We’re pursuing several different self storage projects. So when I was growing up, we did a lot of self storage. There was a lot of healthcare in the stuff that I did growing up as well. And so a lot of my upbringing ties back into that. And it’s quite a bit of multifamily as well, a lot of apartments. So we’re not pursuing any kind

of apartments are multifamily right now, but we’re definitely pursuing the stuff we are doing. The office condo stuff, the self storage we’re doing on some of our land development projects, we’re doing components where it’s single family lots as well as commercial reserves. yeah, I mean, really the commercial stuff is largely what I grew up around. So I still have a.

a very strong affinity for that stuff, of course. So yeah, we’ll definitely continue on that path as well. But it all starts with the land development and entitlement process. So that’s the foundation, kind of literally and figuratively. So we start there and then we may sell a commercial pad site, but we may indeed be selling it to ourselves or kind of a whole other investment piece separate from the land development piece. So, yeah.

Michael Stansbury (26:04.786)
Awesome. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (26:09.338)
Awesome.

Michael Stansbury (26:16.551)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (26:29.798)
Awesome. Well, Jason, folks, all that information will be down below in the show notes. So if you want to get in touch with him, he can do all those different verticals there when it comes to development. Jason, thank you for being part of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Folks, do all the things like and like and comment, subscribe, and we’ll see you next time on the Real Estate Pros podcast. Thank you, Jason.

Jason Hassenstab (26:53.08)
Thank you. Appreciate it.