Kyle 

Instead of buying a house in the suburbs, I decided to buy some abandoned, hundred year old brick buildings. As I attempted to bring these buildings back to some sort of functional use, I became increasingly fascinated with the world of architecture, urban planning, and real estate development.  

 

At first, I thought that the principles of entrepreneurship would translate nicely into the world of real estate development. Some did. Most did not. 

 

Getting increasingly frustrated by the road blocks, obstacles, and being constantly stuck in the “trough of sorrow” , I began wondering, “If real estate development were easy, what would it look like?”

 

This perspective shift led me to notice patterns. I took those patterns and translated them into the success of completing my first building a duplex. 

 

As I began to meet more developers, I noticed something else. There are no small developers. If you are a developer you build and manage 100s of units, not 2. Another thing that seemed interesting to me was becoming a real estate developer doesn’t require any type of certification the way an accountant or a doctor does. Yet, developers are literally changing sky lines, moving roads, and impacting how we all live our lives. 

 

I wanted to be at least a slightly more responsible developer. I felt as if I needed to understand more of the past and combine that with what I’d learned during my first project to help inform future developments and developers. 

 

This collection doesn’t exist anywhere else. I call this my knowledge project because it’s an attempt to take all this scattered data, information, stories, drawings and pictures and put them in one place to inform ultimately what become the patterns of development.

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-Kyle Founder of POD