How Locals Can Lead Real Estate Development:Community Hubs,Crowdfunding & Making the Leap w/ Kristi

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In this conversation, Kristi Kandel shares her journey from a small-town girl in Ohio to a successful real estate developer with over $450 million in projects. She discusses her accidental entry into real estate, the importance of community-led development, and her passion for creating wellness destinations that foster belonging. Kristi emphasizes the need for locals to take charge of their communities and the innovative approaches she is implementing to make this happen, including crowdfunding and integrating local businesses into her projects.

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Kristi Kandel (00:00)
All of that. And in fact, so I knew if I had started my own company, I couldn’t get a car loan. So I actually was out car shopping first and I got SUVs because I fast forward and I said, what’s the worst case scenario? I’m homeless on the street and I have no money. Okay. If I have a car that’s paid for, then maybe I can at least sleep in my car. So as I’m looking at SUVs, I literally had the salespeople put the backs down and I crawled in as if that was going to be my house. And I said, hmm okay

If that’s the worst case scenario and I’m sleeping in my car, even though no friends would ever allow me to do that, I can live with this. I’m not going to die. I’m not, the world’s not going to be over, but it just, had a stronger pull and a put to, to go try and make something happen that it just, was, it was so worth it. Cause you’re, you’re right. You can always go back. It, the biggest thing that, that stops people is just in action and over overthinking. Whereas

Dylan Silver (00:53)
Yeah.

Kristi Kandel (00:54)
Take that step.

Dylan Silver (02:28)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is Kristi Kandel real estate developer behind 450 million in projects across the US from retail, clean energy, housing, and now community led wellness destinations. She’s the founder of IND Consulting and local real estate developers and the co-founder of Elevate, a community driven sports and wellness destination with locals who share the belief that belonging shouldn’t be rare.

Kristi welcome to the show.

Kristi Kandel (02:59)
Hey, thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (03:01)
It’s great to have you on here. We were talking a little bit before hopping on the show here, really about everything that you’re involved in from snowboarding to West Coast of Florida to scuba diving. I want to get into all that, but before we do, how did you get into real estate?

Kristi Kandel (03:18)
Total accident. I grew up in a small town in Ohio and I…

from the beginning chose quality of life over anything else. And I said, I’m moving to Florida. So after graduating college, I moved to Florida, got a job at a national sign company. So we were putting up signs for CVS Pharmacy. And it was through that that I realized, my gosh, These, there’s these people called real estate developers that are building our communities and they’re at the top of the food chain, whereas the sign company, I’m the bottom of the food chain. And after working with them for a year, one day I just asked him,

like, hey guys, what’s it take to be a developer? And they’re like, well, for us, we’re a smaller company in Clearwater, Florida. You just have to be the right person. It’s like, great, when are you hiring me? So I did end up getting hired by them three weeks later and then went on a whirlwind of…

the next four years helping them develop hundreds of locations ⁓ and opening a new office in Southern California. So total accident like most people I meet in real estate development. And that’s also why I started one of my other companies because I want to change that. I want us to get into real estate development on purpose.

Dylan Silver (04:26)
I want to ask you about getting a little bit granular on development. When people talk about development, we were chatting about this beforehand, there’s so many asset classes that you can get involved in, building out subdivisions, you could go commercial residential, could go flex use commercial, industrial, you know even ⁓ land deals, storage facilities, things of the like. When folks are just starting out, do you feel like they should pick in and zone in on one thing? Or what would your advice be to new developers?

Kristi Kandel (04:56)
Honestly, I say stay local, stay in the community that you’re in and you don’t necessarily even have to pick an asset class when it comes to that unless you’re in one of the larger cities. But even within that, you still have your, your sub communities. But really just by looking around and seeing what places are missing, where do, where do you and your friends go, hey, I really wish we had this or you keep driving past an old building or a vacant lot and you go, I really wish someone would do something with that. And then starting from there and going,

and then talking to your city and talking to other people and going, hey, could we build X, Y, or Z here? um So really, it’s honestly starting in your own backyard.

Dylan Silver (06:21)
When you talk about your journey and by happenstance really becoming a developer, what was that first year, two years like? What were the deals like? And then also, did you see where you are today? Was this on your goal board or was it more of a natural progression?

Kristi Kandel (06:36)
You can connect the dots looking back, but you can’t looking forward. I just, I just knew that when I grew up in the small town in Ohio, that I just believed that even a kid from a small town like me who didn’t have money or connections, I was like, I can do and be anything I want to. So I just believed that. And when I started working with a developer, it just there were so many things that I didn’t even know existed in the world. I didn’t know how our communities were formed. I didn’t know how our financial system works. But I knew that by being a sponge

by just taking on more and more opportunity, it was going to open so many more doors. So like I said, when I started with that developer in the Tampa area, two weeks into working with them, I get a call from some, some of the guys on the team who were in California and they’re like, hey, Family Dollar wants us to open locations in California. Can you help us with some of this sign code, landscape, other research? I’m like, heck yeah. I don’t know exactly what all this means, but I know that this could potentially open more doors. And that would have been in maybe August.

of 09, by December I had convinced my team that I should be the one to open the office because I was the only one not married with multiple kids and I was the lowest risk so who knew if it would work out or not.

Dylan Silver (07:48)
Send me out there.

Kristi Kandel (07:49)
Yeah, so I got them by June of the next year. I opened our Orange County, California office and I spent the next four years developing 30 family dollars a year. So from the time our real estate guys got the dirt under contract, I came in, found the architects and engineers, went to the cities, did the due diligence, did the entitlements, presented at planning commissions and city councils, did the permitting and even did construction management. So I’m in my early twenties, getting hundreds of projects, working with hundreds of municipalities. And I just knew that that was that

That was something special because most people will only do maybe five to 10 developments in their whole career because they take two to five years to get done. Um so at the end of like year four, one of my mentors who was also one of my consultants, Vasanthi looks at me and she’s like, you know, you just got a 30 year career worth of experience in the last four years. I was like, ⁓ did I? Entrepreneurial stuff’s going off. And I still had imposter syndrome. like, I’ve been doing single tenant, two acre developments.

Dylan Silver (08:25)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Kristi Kandel (08:49)
the hardest part of the country to do it in, but I haven’t done shopping centers. I haven’t done industrial parks. I haven’t done multifamily. So instead of starting my company, I joined a developer in Newport Beach and we did all of that. And I very quickly realized it’s all about understanding the overall development process. You know, the right questions to ask. that way you can do the bigger projects and they’re actually not harder. You get more time and more money to work on them. And yeah, they’re going to take longer, but they’re actually easier to do because there’s more margin in there.

And so it was after that then in 2015 that’s when I’m like I have to get rid of these golden handcuffs because you’re getting paid really really well and I’ve always been an entrepreneur so I was like if I don’t jump now I’m gonna be stuck in this corporate world forever and that just also was not me. So 2015 is when I took the leap and I’m like I have no idea where it’s going maybe I only get a year maybe it doesn’t work out I can always come back and get a job but I have to bet on me.

Dylan Silver (09:31)
I’m not gonna job.

I want to ask you about this idea of taking that leap, right? It can be terrifying and I, I can speak from personal experience. Everyone thought my best friends, I lost friends actually, because I was frankly tired of people telling me how crazy I was. But in my mind, I was like, I can always go back. But I think there’s a lot of people who really struggle with it. I would say I struggle with that less.

Kristi Kandel (10:03)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:08)
But I really felt like, you know, I can go back. I might not get the same job. I might get a lower paying job, but I can go back. Walk me through your mindset 2015 if I’m talking to Christian, you’re making that leap. What was going through your mind then?

Kristi Kandel (10:56)
All of that. And in fact, so I knew if I had started my own company, I couldn’t get a car loan. So I actually was out car shopping first and I got SUVs because I fast forward and I said, what’s the worst case scenario? I’m homeless on the street and I have no money. Okay. If I have a car that’s paid for, then maybe I can at least sleep in my car. So as I’m looking at SUVs, I literally had the salespeople put the backs down and I crawled in as if that was going to be my house. And I said, hmm okay

If that’s the worst case scenario and I’m sleeping in my car, even though no friends would ever allow me to do that, ⁓ I can live with this. I’m not going to die. I’m not, the world’s not going to be over, but it just, had a stronger pull and a put to, to go try and make something happen that it just, was, it was so worth it. Cause you’re, you’re right. You can always go back. It, the biggest thing that, that stops people is just in action and over overthinking. Whereas

Dylan Silver (11:51)
Yeah.

Kristi Kandel (11:53)
Take that step.

get more information, course correct from there. It’s not like I took this step and said, I’m only going this direction. I took this step and as things evolved and as things came together, then I course corrected and went from there. And I mean, by the end of year one, I had, because development does take time, so I was also doing consulting, I had replaced my six figure salary. And I was like, holy crap, like this is a business. And I had been introduced because I was willing to take risks and get out there. I had been introduced to this new company who was

building hydrogen fueling stations in California and they had the technology, they had the operations, they knew how to get the grants, they did not know how to develop in California. And we then went on a 10-year run of developing every hydrogen station in California, the supply chain, like ridiculous. Like me, a kid from small town Ohio is figuring out how to get hydrogen fueling stations up and built in California. Like

blows your mind, but I would have never known if I hadn’t gone out there and taken the risk and gone, yeah, what’s the worst that can happen?

Dylan Silver (12:50)
It’s mind blowing.

Did you have, I mean, we’re talking about hydrogen fueling stations. Did you have any experience with utilities prior to that, like oil and gas or something similar?

Kristi Kandel (13:07)
None of that previously. The only utility experience was when we were developing all of our projects, getting power, gas, telecom, water, sewer to projects, but no clean energy. Um I had had right before those guys, ah because of someone else in my network, they had connected me with another hydrogen company who was doing fuel cells where they were adding solar and fuel cells to Home Depot’s to get them off the grid. And…

Really, again, like any type of development, you just, if you understand the process and you know how to get development done, I can learn the technical parts enough to be dangerous, but then our clients would come in with their experts if we truly needed to break it down with a fire chief and go, hey, here’s all the safety mechanisms. Here’s why this station isn’t just gonna go boom, here, so here’s the technical. ⁓ And then I would lead the, the development part. And I’ve always been a person like, we’re gonna figure it out.

Like everything is figure it out-able, so you know, they’re clearly coming to me because they don’t have the answer. I’m gonna go figure it out.

Dylan Silver (13:58)
We’re gonna figure it out.

We’re going to go figure it out. That’s really the hallmark of a great real estate operator, whether it’s development or, you know, single family fix and flip. You have to have the ability to pivot, identify market shifts. People are doing that right now. I’m Texas licensed realtor and a lot of people in Dallas, Fort Worth, Metro who are doing fix and flip are getting into ground up construction just because of the market shift. You’ve got to have that ability to pivot. Speaking of, I do want to ask you about the community.

building and community-led destinations that you’re involved in. I’m really passionate about this. I didn’t realize that there were other, you know, people in the country who were equally passionate about this. Walk me through some of this.

Kristi Kandel (15:29)
Yeah. So ⁓ to back up a little bit in 2024, I ended up also founding local real estate developers. And that is a company that I started to empower locals to be the developers in their community. We have over 16,000 communities in the U S that have a population of less than 10,000 people. If you can flip that house, you can flip that downtown building that has a couple office spaces and residential above. So that has been very, a huge passion project of mine is to get more locals doing it.

to where they’re in on purpose. And what that has evolved to is we’ve got our locals leading our community destinations. And I finally found the project that lights me up and goes, I want to spend four to five years working on each location. So we in August, late August of this year of 2025, we founded Elevate, which is our community led sports and wellness destination where it’s basically reinventing the park system to where we had these spaces where we would go join and gather and that

that if you were a member of the community, you belonged. But then adding in to some modern elements of it. we’ll have a combination of the indoor and outdoor sports. So pickleball, volleyball, tennis, soccer, basketball, all this stuff, and we’ll leverage today’s technology. But we’ll also include a indoor outdoor dog park. And we’ll also have a food hall that showcases 10 to 12 local restaurants who can come in for a fraction of the overhead cost and show their specialties and teach nutrition and

give us variety. We have a sports bar that has, you your simulations and all the games that go with that. Outdoor entertainment that has the lazy river around it and concerts and movies. But also our wellness component because we… we

Dylan Silver (16:57)
Yeah.

Kristi Kandel (17:12)
have our places where we can eat and drink and play. But what about the places where we recover, where we stay healthy, where we have preventative care without going through doctors and insurance and like you just twisted your ankle. You just want to know how to get back. You want to know how to properly stretch before your pickleball tournament and how to stay warm in between games and how when you’re done, you can recover. so that way the next day you’re not feeling like everything’s heavy and then you’re just like so stiff. So it’s really just creating that, that whole community hub that no matter who you

Dylan Silver (17:21)
Yeah, there’s none of that. Right, we need that.

I know.

Kristi Kandel (17:42)
are, you belong in the community. Um and then the cool part is how we’re going to fund it. And this is a huge project, but like you’ve heard on the other stuff that I’ve done, I’ve done big projects. This one is so complex that it’s going to require a community. It’s going to require a collaborative approach. ⁓

And from a funding standpoint, we’ll have our traditional accredited investors. But then with local real estate developers, we’ve created a crowdfunding platform to where the locals can also invest. You don’t need a hundred thousand. You could put in 500 bucks um and you can be part owner of this. And then also we’ll have a nonprofit level because we want to keep certain aspects, aspects free to the public. You belong just because you live here. So it’s again, it’s complex as hell, but it’s totally worth it. And it’s something that has gotten me incredibly

excited. So we’re working in Southwest Florida, also in St. Pete, to create our flagship and then our legacy destination. And then from there, we’re really trying to create the playbook because I like to do things at scale.

but that we can take to other communities and go, hey, here’s a model that works. And it doesn’t matter if you’re red or blue or what all this is, you all chose to live in this community because of the same reason. Let’s bring you together as community members. Let’s build those bonds and let’s create this grassroots movement of community that, I don’t know, that maybe changes the world or at least your community.

Dylan Silver (18:39)
Yeah.

of community.

I’m, I’m with it and you know what, I, I grew up playing tennis and I always thought it was interesting because I love tennis so much and I felt like there’s just not enough being done in tennis to innovate. Well then I stopped playing tennis and here boom, pickleball. And it’s like everywhere, I mean I was living you know an hour north of Fort Worth in, in DFW Metro, Dallas-Fort Worth Metro, and there was pickleball even everywhere there and you’re in like farm territory.

Kristi Kandel (19:31)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (19:32)
So

I’m thinking like, this is really changing things. And then what you’re doing is taking it five steps further with the integration of local businesses, restaurants, wellness centers, right? I wanna ask you, where did this idea come from? Was it an aha moment that you had? Was it a conversation amongst peers? How did you decide, hey, I wanna ⁓ make the playbook for communities?

Kristi Kandel (19:56)
It’s kind of.

been there since 2007 when I moved to St. Pete and I realized the place we were playing volleyball at was this crappy hole in the wall bar with crappy food and we were kind of there but not really gathering and it wasn’t quite enough. But honestly a lot more happened when 2022 I live in Fort Myers Beach, Hurricane Ian wiped out our community and it was then that outside developers swooped in and everyone went, oh my gosh, our community is gone. And it was, it will never be the same again. And the number, the dollars that are pouring in, it will be

super upscale now. And that all led to creating local real estate developers because our locals need to be the ones who are creating these spaces in our communities. And if we’re constantly upgrading and improving, when a natural disaster comes, we’re going to be built to current codes and we’re not just going to wash away and then be left hopeless. So it was really all of that kind of coming together and leading up to the point where I’ve used sports everywhere I’ve lived to make, make friends. So beach volleyball has been how I’ve made friends and everywhere I’ve traveled throughout the

and we were talking about being nomads before. My dog made me get a truck and a truck camper, so I’ve also traveled the country many, many times. And it doesn’t matter what town or community I stop in, I hear the same things and people go, where’s my community? How do I make friends as an adult? What do we do? And so it’s, let’s solve that problem. Like we can solve it, it’s hard, but we can solve it. And honestly, if a bunch of us come together and we truly make it a community led and a community driven project, the lift isn’t that heavy. ⁓

Dylan Silver (21:10)
Yeah. What do we do?

Kristi Kandel (21:25)
its’s a little bit of lift from everyone and we’re all in this together and we can do it. We just all have to get aligned and that’s, that’s really where the role of a developer comes in is you’re creating the vision that then helps inspire and galvanize your community and you don’t have to do it all because everyone has so many different strengths and abilities. You just got to build the team and get everyone excited and keep the ship going straight. That it really becomes fun.

Dylan Silver (21:51)
Hey, I’m with it. I, I can get behind it 100%. And I think everyone who’s listening can relate to that sentiment that, you know, it’s harder and harder to make a friend. It’s harder and harder to find community. You talk about creating community. Well, what if the community was in a way already established and you simply had to walk to it, right? It’s there for you. I think that’s what you’re doing. It’s phenomenal. We are coming up on time here, Kristi.

Where can folks go if they’re interested in reaching out to you, if they’d like to learn more about you know the community playbook? How can folks get in contact with you?

Kristi Kandel (22:26)
Yeah, I’m very easy now to find if you just Google my name, but you could go to kristikandel.com, localrealestatedevelopers.com or elevate-communities.com. But really, if you if you search for my name, you’ll find me on all the socials and and online. And I’m, I’m the one responding to the DMS and the messages I, I truly enjoy everyone I get to meet and talk to and the different perspectives they bring.

Dylan Silver (22:52)
Kristi, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Kristi Kandel (22:55)
Thanks for having me.

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Investor Fuel

How Locals Can Lead Real Estate Development:Community Hubs,Crowdfunding & Making the Leap w/ Kristi

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