Casey Roloff is the visionary behind Seabrook, Washington—a purpose-built, walkable town inspired by new urbanist principles and over two decades in the making.
In this episode, he shares how low leverage, long-term thinking, and a deep respect for timeless town design helped Seabrook survive market cycles and become a model for a new kind of American development.
We also dive into his vision for scaling this movement, his take on car-centric suburbia, and what it will take to make great places accessible to the next generation of homeowners.
You can see the video and transcript here on Substack, or watch and listen on any of the following platforms:
The Thesis Driven Leader Series is made possible with the support of Neutral.
Neutral is redefining multifamily real estate with a focus on sustainability, resident health and well-being. For example, Neutral is building the tallest mass timber and Passive House residential building in the U.S with a state-of-art wellness club in Milwaukee. Beyond environmental impact, Neutral offers investors access to substantial sustainable tax credits and deductions. Accredited investors can explore available opportunities at invest.neutral.us or connect directly with their team to learn more.
The following transcript is automatically generated. Please forgive us for any errors or misspellings.
Brad Hargreaves: Hello and welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader series. I'm Brad Hargreaves, founder and Editor in Chief of Thesis Driven and your host today. So as regular Thesis Driven readers know I really love covering new cities and the people building them, and few people have been as successful building totally new places, totally separate from any existing metro area in recent decades than Casey Roloff, the founder of Seabrook, Washington, who will be our guest here today.
Seabrook is a beautiful beach town. It's about two hours west of Seattle, and Casey has done a really great job building it on new urbanist principles with a great combination of retail, high density housing, walkability, and really an overall exceptional experience much in the line of the new urbanist communities like Alice Beach, [00:01:00] Seaside, Rosemary Beach along 30A in Florida, which was a big inspiration to him.
We're gonna talk about that on the show, but we're also going to talk about Casey as a developer and how he has been able to be successful, partly because of this long time horizon that has enabled the building of a totally new city along the Washington coast. He's been doing this for almost 25 years, taking advantage of this low leverage, long haul approach that's enabled him to survive the global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, the runup in interest rates, a lot of things that sunk many of his peers and have made building new cities really hard.
That approach has put him in a pretty incredible spot. He just got approval to build another 1300 homes in Seabrook, a really a great place you should visit if you haven't.
Before we get to Casey and bring him on the show, I did want to take a moment to thank the season sponsor, Neutral, what we're doing with Thesis Driven Leader series wouldn't be [00:02:00] possible without them.
They build institutional grade, multi-family projects with mass timber that meet the industry's most rigorous certifications, like passive house, living building, challenge lead, and energy star. By leveraging those sustainability tax benefits, neutral passes those savings onto investors, sometimes up to 60% of investment value in additional deductions.
You can explore neutrals investment offerings at Invest Neutral.us.
As I said, we are really excited to have Casey Roloff, founder of Seabrook Washington on the show. Today we're gonna talk about the art and science of New City building, what it takes to build a great place. We're also going to dive into Seabrook's story and the secrets of his success, whether you're a developer or real estate investor, or just care about building great places.
This is an episode you don't want to miss. Let's bring Casey on.
Casey, welcome to the Thesis Driven Leader Series. Excited to have you on the show today.
Casey Roloff: Great to be back.
Brad Hargreaves: So let's start talking about the design of what you've built, which is really incredible and very thoughtful. [00:03:00] Take us through it your inspiration for the design. It differs a lot from most quote-unquote master plan communities out there. Take us a bit through the inspiration for how Seabrook has designed and how you see it playing out here. We'd love to understand that a little bit better and how it fits into the landscape of new urbanism.
Casey Roloff: Yeah. First of all, master plan communities terminology came up really when suburbia started, because we used to just call them towns. The best places in the world were designed before the automobile, and those are the places that have inspired us, places that were built at a human scale, a walkable scale. It was the founders of Seaside, Robert and his wife Daryl Davis, they had the courage to bring back the art of town building and that human scale design that we are all thirsting for.
Brad Hargreaves: So this is Seaside, Florida, on the Florida Gulf Coast, on 30A is the name of the road, and there are few of these really cool little towns along 30A. Seaside was [00:04:00] the first, correct?
Casey Roloff: Yeah, Seaside was definitely the first, and it inspired a lot of developers. It inspired a lot of policy makers. When you hear smart growth, the "walkability" term, Seaside brought all that back, and even urban infill around the country has been inspired by Seaside because we grew away from our cities. Our towns were just dirty, grimy places, and we were convinced by developers that if we moved away from those places, we were gonna have better lives, greener pastures, more space, more elbow room. But it left a lot to be desired, which was again, connections with our neighbors, walkability, and we spend more time in our cars than ever. The average commute right now is 54 minutes in each direction. So it's pretty intense what suburban development has created in our lives.
Brad Hargreaves: One of the things I love about Seabrook is the walkability. Tell me a little bit about how you thought about the walkability and [00:05:00] designed for that.
I loved your concept of the transect, which is a design concept that you see in a lot of places, but you really put it into practice. Tell me a little bit about that and how that manifests.
Casey Roloff: Yeah, we get a lot of credit for the design of Seabrook, and there's no question our team has worked incredibly hard to design and build this community.
But we're just constantly learning from the best places in the world. The best towns, the best cities and just applying that same urban planning methodology and urban design to our town. The good news is that this isn't something that you have to invent on your own.
This is something that we can learn from the best places. One thing that is unique to Seabrook is that we saw all the success that happened at Seaside on 30A, which is Northwest Florida between Destin and Panama City. Put it on your bucket list if you haven't been there because it's just a phenomenal place and incredible story, which created a lot of development along that 30A.
In fact, I was [00:06:00] talking to one of the executives at VRBO and they said it's the most popular vacation rental destination in the world, just because of these new towns that were built. And of course, for the most part, single-family residences.
It all started when VRBO started, allowed us to push a little further, take a little more risk, and buy all the land around Seabrook so that we could fully build out what is known as the Transect. Transect is really the transitions from the urban core, the shopping, the restaurants, all the creature comforts, our basic needs, out to the natural edge.
The best places in the world have this amazing combination of all those urban creature comforts, but then they're surrounded by this raw nature with trails, mountain biking, and hiking, so you have the best of both worlds, all within a short walking distance.
A great example is Nantucket. My wife and I never been to Nantucket. And we were walking along Main Street, had a great breakfast, [00:07:00] hopped on our bikes, and in 10 minutes we were out at Cisco Farms, which is actually a brewery out there, just surrounded by nature and pasture land, just a short distance.
When you have that transect in place, it creates a really high quality of life. Now, sadly, the greatest places in our country, i'll use Santa Barbara for example, Santa Barbara is an incredible place, but the edges of town that used to be the countryside were redeveloped into suburban sprawl.
Like Nantucket's unusual that they didn't develop sprawl around the town center out on the edge of town. That's still intact. There's not very many places where that's still intact unless you go to Europe or you go to another country where they've preserved that landscape.
Brad Hargreaves: Thinking about that design, these are very old design concepts in a lot of ways and today we think about the concepts of walkability, these new urbanist principles. Even though they're not widely embraced, they're at least widely known and understood and appreciated, whereas you go [00:08:00] back to 2000, 2005, people weren't talking about these things in the same way.
You've experienced this entire arc, call it renaissance of urban American people recognizing that these 19th-century town-building concepts, pre-car concepts, build a better environment.
One thing that's allowed you to do that is you've maintained control over Seabrook for more than two decades, obviously through some serious downturns, the GFC, all that.
How did you accomplish that without big institutional backing, or because you didn't have big institutional backing, manage to keep building, keep control of what you were doing at Seabrook over that long period of time?
Casey Roloff: I'll start with that first part of the question, which is this movement, while it's recognized, we're definitely on the fringe. We're not mainstream development. Mostly suburban development, and the system, [00:09:00] the way that our land use regulations are set up, is set up for sprawl development.
It's easier to develop sprawl based development than it is to develop mixed use walkable towns and villages, and then there's the money behind it. Banks and equity and lenders. They want to go with what's proven and if someone to develop 500 homes or 1,000 homes with not a coffee shop or a bookstore within, that's okay. That's all coming to a screeching halt right now, for several reasons.
Affordability. We have a loneliness epidemic in our country. Climate change and our health has been really negatively impacted by suburban development. Just moving around physically, but also just not making social connections with our neighbors because our neighborhoods aren't designed to really foster community.
I've never been more excited about this movement because it's now finally coming to the forefront and [00:10:00] developers, the money guys, everyone's having to rethink what the consumer wants and what the consumer needs. We're hoping to be a big part of that.
The second part of your question, just how did we do it? Robert Davis again, founder of Seaside, Florida, he essentially gave us the playbook, and one of the things that he said to me early on was that, Casey, I want to make sure that you're the first developer and the last developer.
Because, especially in secondary markets, it's usually the third or fourth or even fifth guy that makes the money. It's usually someone's dream. They have these big visions of what they're gonna build and then they struggle to even get out of the ground and then the bank takes it back and then sells it for pennies on the dollar, and then someone else comes in and so forth.
And there's just more examples of that than there are successful examples. But what he taught us was to do things very slowly and incrementally, slow and steady wins the race. Never building things that we can't afford to build. We've kept our debt [00:11:00] below a 20% debt to equity ratio since the inception of Seabrook.
For example, when the financial crisis hit in 2008 most people thought, oh boy, that place out at the beach, Seabrook, they're gonna go down. Because it's again, a secondary market, but it was actually the opposite. We kept selling houses and kept building houses and that's because we didn't overdevelop, instead of developing 300 lots, we developed 30 lots or 40 lots. We would pre-sell 90% of our houses with a 15% non-refundable deposit before we get a hammer out or build anything. When I first started, we had 9/11, and this is before Seabrook, and I thought it was the end. We all did. But we've done things again very slowly, very incrementally, and we've been focused on the customer experience. We've been a purpose-driven company, not about just selling houses. We've raised our family here.
In the greatest towns and the greatest cities in the world, the founders of those places lived there. They didn't drive [00:12:00] away at five o'clock, and commute an hour to their private residence in a gated community. They actually lived, their kids went to school, they shopped in the same places that their neighbors shopped and they were a part of the fabric of the community. That's something we need more of. We need the people that are developing the places to live in the place itself, because you have such a different perspective.
All of those things have helped us, the ups and downs of real estate markets and financial markets. It was actually a good thing that banks and equity didn't want to give us money in the early days. They were very skeptical of what we were doing, and so it forced us to just bootstrap it and do it very slowly.
Brad Hargreaves: Not get out over your skis. Makes sense. Let's talk a little bit about the location. You see a lot of developments, even some interesting, new urbanist developments, things like Trilith that you mentioned to me the other day, being built outside Atlanta, are effectively, even if they are great communities and building at high density, they're [00:13:00] effectively within the kind of suburban exurban metro area.
But Seabrook, that's not where it is. It's within two hours of Seattle, but it's on the beach. It's not that close to either Seattle or Portland. Tell me a little bit about the thinking of behind this location and not say, you're 45 minutes in the exurbs of Seattle.
Casey Roloff: Whether you're developing suburban development or urban development, the fundamentals have to be there, right? There has to be the demand and the demographics you need to make the sales and make the project viable. There's countless examples of failed walkable communities and there's countless examples of suburban failures, just like there are successes on both sides.
We've been successful because we were in the right place at the right time, like any really successful real estate project.
We definitely stuck our necks out. No one really believed in this area, similar to Northwest Florida. They called that the Redneck Riviera, [00:14:00] Southern Alabama, and now those houses are selling for $12-15 million that are on the gulf.
Brad Hargreaves: I'm dating myself, I think my senior year of high school, they were building Seaside in the very early years, and I grew up in the south.
I went to high school in Shreveport, Louisiana, and a couple of friends and I rented a beach house in Seaside 'cause it was like weird and new and cheap and it was a Redneck Riviera. We didn't even know it as Seaside. That's what it was.
I just had to share that little personal anecdote because it was not what it is today by any stretch of the imagination back then, 25 plus years ago.
Casey Roloff: So similarly, we had to pioneer this. We had to reinvent what people thought of this place or this area, and thankfully to get here. It is a spectacular, natural environment perched up on the Pacific Ocean, of course, we've got the Olympic National Park in our backyard. We're about three hours from Portland, so we're a triangle between Seattle and Portland on the coast. So again, we were very fortunate.
And of course we have Microsoft [00:15:00] and Amazon and Costco and Starbucks and Nordstrom's all in our backyard, so those are the primary people that are buying these houses. Essentially, we're creating the Nantucket for the state of Washington or the Puget Sound population.
There really wasn't a competitor in our marketplace and you had to go down to the Oregon coast to really get this quality design and build.
Brad Hargreaves: So I wanna drill into the location a little bit. Even the Redneck Riviera, or what was then known as the Redneck Riviera, you had Destin, Fort Walton Beach, you had some areas that were drawing a lot of visitors, drawing a lot of tourists.
That is a known area, albeit regionally. Here, it's really rural, it's very working class. It's out there. You saw it, you had a vision, but there had to be some interesting conversations with the locals, right? You're coming in, you're bringing a destination beach town where none existed before and none existed really in the area and the way you built [00:16:00] it.
Tell me about what were those conversations like in the early days?
Casey Roloff: The people that were the closest to it were the biggest naysayers really. It was harder to convince someone that lived around here locally that this was gonna work, including lenders and people that were in the real estate business.
It was easier to convince people from Seattle, or people from Bellevue, or the greater Puget Sound that, "Hey, we're building this town. It's gonna be perched on the ocean front." There's a development that's just south of here called Ocean Shores. Like Panama City is to Florida, Ocean Shores is that place here and it doesn't have a lot of quality development or buildings. It left a little bit of a black eye on the Washington coast. A developer came in and developed 12,000 lots back in the sixties, and when I came up here, 9,000 of those lots were still vacant lots.
Again, this area was a very unlikely place to have some success, but it was more the built [00:17:00] environment or the design of the built environment being suburban that really held back this coastline. Because it was one of the last sections of coastline to be developed, it was all about the car and all about big home on a big lot, no sidewalks, no alleyways, no shops or restaurants within short distance.
Brad Hargreaves: So you've obviously gotten permission, incrementally, but you've gotten entitlements at this point, built quite a bit. Like how have those entitlement conversations gone with this local community?
Casey Roloff: Our county's pretty pro business, and so they've been actually great partners in this whole thing and believing in this. And of course there were some forward thinking people at the county that actually heard about Seaside, did some research. And then they also looked at our neighborhood that we did on the Oregon coast that was very successful, so we had a track record, and so there was some confidence there. But it was a heavy lift. There's no question about it. Getting it off the ground and it was just a lot of [00:18:00] perseverance and we had to develop a culture of people that believed in this too and believed that we could be successful here.
Brad Hargreaves: You just got another big expansion, I believe it was last year in entitled, correct? How many new lots in the new expansion?
Casey Roloff: So we had two more villages approved that are adjacent to Seabrook. They kind of straddle. One's to the north, one to the south, and so they'll be building off the success of Seabrook.
Seabrook is about 85% complete and over the next three years, with about $120 million in investment, we'll be completing the town center, a new school, a new community center, and a new medical center - big game changing projects that will be finished in this next three years.
Brad Hargreaves: Schools, medical centers, these are the hallmarks of getting to that critical mass.
Casey Roloff: It goes from a place that people were just vacationing to a place where people say actually I could live here. It starts to resonate more with people. Like, why would I even want to go home? Because I have all this within walking distance. Forbes [00:19:00] did a story on walkable communities and what urban design does to our psychology and people walk around here and they're like, why is everybody smiling and friendly to each other? If you come here for the first time, it almost seems fake. Are people paying these people to be nice to me? Are they actors?
But it's actually the urban environment, when you design things and you actually connect people through this design, people feel better. It lifts their spirits. They're happier. And that's why the happiest, healthiest people live in walkable communities. If you follow Blue Zones, we're essentially building a blue zone here which is the study of the communities in the world that are centenarian. So it's the studying of, why do people live to a hundred and beyond and why are they happy? And Blue Zones has really uncovered a lot of those reasons, and walkability multi-generational living and having purpose in your community, all those things matter when it comes to your health and wellbeing.
Brad Hargreaves: I wanna dig a little bit more into this [00:20:00] concept of permanent residence. I don't think I spent a lot of time on that when we did our deep dive on Seabrook a little bit over a year ago. But I wouldn't even say a criticism or a shortfall, but like something I think a lot of folks that are going out, like the Jan Srameks of the world, we'll talk about California Forever in a second, they would say, " this is great. It's got good design, but we're doing something different. We're bringing jobs, permanent residents. We are looking to create something more than a vacation town." I'm curious about that journey, that step along the way, and what do you think is needed to get people saying, "Hey, I'm going to come to Seabrook and I'm going to live there. I'm gonna put my kids in school." Obviously having a school is a big step along the way, that's where it gets really exciting. So what do you think is needed there?
Casey Roloff: This movement isn't about vacation towns or destinations or luxury or any of those things. The beauty with Seaside was a beach town, a destination, but [00:21:00] it allowed people to test drive what a walkable community would be like to live in and Seabrook is the exact same thing.
It's this place that people come here and they almost forget that this is the way we used to build things and there's an option to live like this. And what drove prices up in northwest Florida was that people were so thirsty for knowing their neighbor and walking to the coffee shop in the morning and not getting in their car for as long as they're there, that was so impactful to people it just drove prices out of the universe.
But what we're really about is bringing this to the masses. Like Robert and Daryl's vision wasn't just Seaside. They hoped that it would create a movement so that people could live in a place like this full-time. That's where we're taking that baton and saying, we want to take all of our best practices over the last 20 plus years and the best practices from Northwest Florida and apply that to [00:22:00] the primary market which needs this desperately.
There was a real paradigm shift when the automobile came into the picture in the twenties and thirties that we went from designing, taking this really sophisticated approach to human scale development and walkable communities to autocentric design and that's what's shaped the last a hundred years. Well now, because of the pressures with affordability and the pressures that we're facing in a lot of different areas, we have to shift back to building denser, mixed use, walkable communities. We call it the New American Dream and the current American dream has been, I want my 2,000 square foot house on my 4,000 square foot lot with my two car garage and my driveway, but the future is going to be a 1400 square foot townhouse but your quality of life could be much richer because you're within walking distance of schools, shops, restaurants, and you [00:23:00] actually connect with your neighbors because of the design. So we wanna reshape what that American dream really is about.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. I really enjoyed what you said around the test case giving them that example of what walkable urbanism could be. That test. You know, I've always been curious, like you have these examples of Americans who will go vacation in Europe. They'll stay in some, beautiful like Italian hill town. Love it. They'll lose 10 pounds 'cause they're walking everywhere and they'll be like that was fun. Let me go back home to my car dependent suburb in north of Dallas and advocate for all the same terrible policies that have perpetuated that.
So I'm hoping that something that is maybe a little bit closer to home to them will give them an example of no, this can happen in the US too, and it doesn't have to be built in the 15th century to defend against the Ottomans for it to work. I'm hoping. Thinking about this as a movement, [00:24:00] what are other examples you see out there?
Obviously we've talked about this stuff on 30A, the Seaside and the towns next to it. What are other examples you see out there today of maybe someone bringing this to more of an urban center, permanent housing, of this kind of design done well?
Casey Roloff: I call myself an urbanist and this group of people, I've mentioned that we're part of, the New Town Builders Association. We're not just about building new towns. We are about infill, so it starts with the cities and redeveloping sections of cities to higher density, walkable, safe places to live for families and adults.
Our cities need to be designed in a way where you can raise a family with young kids in those places. We're focused on more greenfield because that's the part that suburbia is really having a reckoning. We need better models for greenfield development because we are gonna continue to expand out and so we [00:25:00] need to show people that you can build great places in new areas.
Another big part of this movement is suburban retrofits. Taking large swaths of suburban areas - old malls, parking lots, retail areas, where big box maybe failed and then redeveloping those into high density, walkable communities. We're about all of that.
It's not just one thing. We're just about people living in beautiful, healthy, friendly places where you wanna live and where you wanna raise a family, or if you don't have a family, you just love the fact that it's multi-generational and there are kids running around and that's what makes great communities.
So just to answer that question, we're about all of that, right? Like it's not a one or the other, it's all of this needs to happen. But there's a lot of great infill developers and cities and towns, so we've focused on these more on the edge, out on more remote locations.
But going back to the [00:26:00] primary market, we're looking at sites that are closer to metropolitan areas for primary residences and building that missing middle housing. It's a big buzz word now. But literally for the last a hundred years we've been building single family houses and apartments for the most part. Nothing really in between. And so builders and developers are scrambling around going, how do we do this missing middle housing? What is this? The duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, 12 plexes.
We're naturally afraid of density because when we do it in a suburban way, it's not pretty. To build density, you need a lot of finesse, and the urban planning fundamentals, and the architectural design requirements of our great old places, towns, cities, they were amazing at finessing high density into a beautiful place to live rather than a place you just wanna run away from. Now that [00:27:00] developers and home builders are being forced to increase density, they've gotta figure out how to, again, finesse it in a way that people actually wanna live there.
Brad Hargreaves: So just to maybe get a bit more specific. Thinking about metro areas, about individual cities that are doing this well, if there are any in the U.S. People name Carmel, Indiana sometimes, and I look at it and I'm like, okay it's new build, but it feels to me like lipstick on a pig. It's still car-centric. You just have buildings that are a little bit closer to the street, but there's still parking lots everywhere. It's a bit of a veneer to me.
The other end of the spectrum, you have Houston where obviously ton of sprawling, but they have legalized town homes. It is anything goes. Being anything goes, you've gotten this kind of organic density that I think is really interesting, but then there's no zoning whatsoever.
There's just a patchwork of HOAs, so you can get these weird situations where you truly do have incompatible uses next to each other. So it was a bit of a ramble, but I'm just curious, your take on [00:28:00] these different visions, different versions, are any of them getting close?
Casey Roloff: I think that Carmel, Indiana, which, by the way, I've never been there, but what I've studied and learned about it is that the transformation there has been incredible to actually shift the focus back to the pedestrian, making it walkable, making it bikeable and more communal, where we actually again, reconnect with our neighbors.
But it's hard to, again, retrofit an area that was so dominated by suburban design. And so I give places like that a lot of credit that they're working to reverse that and I don't know what's happening right now exactly in Houston. I know there is a lot of things happening, but I know Houston is one of the most sprawl based cities in America, along with Atlanta and so it's great that the efforts are being made to turn the tides. I just, I want to encourage that. And for example, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, they've [00:29:00] always been great infill development. It's really Pearl District in Portland, which was, again, inspired by Seaside. It really made infill cool again and that we can actually redevelop these kind of industrial areas in our cities that were somewhat forgotten and make them into these really livable, beautiful places.
Out here, I'm always inspired by the development that's happening in our cities. Now, there's leadership issues in our cities that have not protected the built environment and the businesses that are on the streets that, thankfully that's all coming back now, but it's been a painful last five years watching these incredibly vibrant places deteriorate and become not so safe. It's a hardware software thing. The hardware is amazing. It's the software that glitched and it didn't defend our cities the way it should have.
Brad Hargreaves: It certainly feels like Pearl District is like exhibit A of that list of you've [00:30:00] got great hardware and incredible built environment in just a civic leadership that's out to lunch.
Casey Roloff: Yes. And we are very excited about the new mayor there in Portland. He's gonna turn it around.
Brad Hargreaves: So one other kind of new build project I wanted to get your take on, I mentioned it briefly earlier, is California Forever in Solano County. They delayed the referendum. They were going to go and try to get approval last year, now it seems like they're looking at can they get annexed by an existing town that would allow them to circumvent some of the limitations. There's a lot of things happening there, but just in terms of vision and what they're doing from what's been discussed so far, obviously there's no built environment there yet, curious, your take?
Casey Roloff: I think some of the concepts they're talking about are really interesting and exciting. We know that we have a massive shortage of housing in our country. With urban growth boundaries, it's really limited the ability to create more attainable priced houses. So you gotta do something, right?
I think their vision of creating a new city is a great one [00:31:00] because we have to build and California's a really difficult place to try and do that. Beyond that, I don't know that much about it. I've seen renderings, but my advice to them would be don't try to reinvent the wheel.
I think a lot of what we've prided ourselves in here is just being sponges and learning everything that we can learn from the developers before us. Like what worked, what didn't work, and that's why again, Seaside and Rosemary Beach and these other new towns that have been developed, we've tried to take the best practices from those places and lessons learned and apply that. And then of course, our own lessons learned and by us going pretty slow over the last 20 years, has allowed us to find the efficiencies, and now our objective is to scale all these lessons learned at a faster pace, which is what you need in the primary market.
So that's again, what we're focused on as far as [00:32:00] again, California Forever, I wish them luck. I don't know about the politics and the landowners that were there before. I know that it's hard to see change. It's hard to see new development happen for people that have lived there for generations on a farm, that kind of thing.
So I have sympathy for that . When 70% of Americans that don't own a home believe they'll never own a home, that's pretty sad. So we've gotta do something about that. So we obviously need to create more opportunities for people to own homes at attainable prices.
Brad Hargreaves: So I wanna focus back on Seabrook and where it stands right now in some of the your plans for this movement. But maybe before we do that, I'd love to hear your take on how the capital markets have responded to your success. You mentioned earlier that one of the positive limitations in a good way is just lenders were skeptical, investors were skeptical, and that kept you on the right track in terms of [00:33:00] building at a pace that you could sustain, a pace that allowed you to emerge from 2008, 2009 unscathed. Do you think though, that view of the capital markets has changed? Do you think there's more appetite for these new kind of developments and new urbanist communities?
Casey Roloff: Yeah, so while I mostly hang out with developers that are developing these types of communities, more walkable, urban places I also like to infiltrate the suburban development conferences.
There was one down in Dallas this fall that I attended called the Future of Master Plan Communities. It's sponsored by Zonda and Builder Magazine and it was very exciting to hear all the consumer research that, now, the number one attribute for what a home buyer is looking for is to be able to walk to a coffee shop from their house.
Which is again, it's great news. Of course, I am thinking why not the grocery store and the bookstore [00:34:00] and the pub and those kind of things too. It's not just a cup of coffee. And so basically what people want are towns. They want to be able to walk to a main street.
They want their kids to walk to school. They want to sit on their porch and talk to a neighbor, walking by on the sidewalk. So that's why I'm saying there is a paradigm shift that's happening right now, and we've been in some very interesting conversations with some of the biggest capital around the country.
They are trying to figure this out and that's very exciting because like I said, we've been fringe, the Seasides and the Rosemarys and the Triliths and Seabrooks. We've been this, these fringe developers and people just watching to see is this really gonna work?
And now with the pressures that are on our economy and the consumer, we have to figure out how to build higher density, walkable communities. So going from say, six to eight homes per acre to 15, 20, 25 units to the acre, but [00:35:00] having actually a better quality life in a denser, more walkable community than in a suburban neighborhood where you're literally a half hour in some cases from a major grocery store.
Brad Hargreaves: I love that. And you think that the tide is shifting with some of the capital players? Music to my ears,
Casey Roloff: It absolutely is shifting.
Brad Hargreaves: How about lenders? Do you believe that if the investors come on board, the lenders will follow?
Casey Roloff: We're 25 years in and we have amazing relationships with our lenders. They're all regional banks. We've never banked with any of the big banks and that's been more by choice, quite honestly. We wanna be able to sit down, we're obviously on a video call, but we wanna be able to sit down with someone in their conference room and answer questions and talk about our plans and build a relationship.
Having really strong relationships with our lenders has been really important to us. They love what we're doing. They're on board. Because they're smaller banks, there are capacity issues to do the bigger stuff. We'll have to be talking to larger [00:36:00] banks when we actually start a bigger community in the future.
Brad Hargreaves: So let's talk about those bigger communities. Before we move into the lightning round, last question, where do things go from here for you? You mentioned you're building two more villages. Is that it or are you looking outside the Pacific Northwest as well for the next community?
Casey Roloff: Our goal is to, again, distill everything that we've learned over the past 25 and then combine that with what's been learned in the suburban markets as far as what home builders need, what the national home builders need, and how they roll out a project, the demands that they require as far as needing, you can't get away with building 50 lots at a time, right? You really have to be able to develop lots at a larger scale.
Newland Communities is the largest master plan community developer in North America. And so taking lessons learned from a Newland Communities and applying that to the urban design. So basically taking the [00:37:00] lessons we've learned and then combining that with one of the major master plan community developers is really what we're trying to do.
Just taking, some of their playbook and some of our playbook and merging those two. And again even Newland, which is now owned by Brookfield, they've been talking a lot about this. They're hearing it from their buyers. They're hearing it from their builders. We've had some interesting conversations with them.
We are gonna be going out to a broader market early summer, and we're looking for capital that's really aligned with our values and wants to see more of this out there because we think we can actually increase sales velocity. When you bring prices down by adding more density, now you're adding more sales velocity, more desirability, because the more energy you have, the more sustainable the retail is, the shops, the restaurants, and having that community.
Brad Hargreaves: I love it.
Before we wrap up, let's move to the lightning [00:38:00] round. So we ask a small number of questions, same questions to every guest on the Leader Series show. Shall we hop into it?
Casey Roloff: Great. Let's do it.
Brad Hargreaves: So first question, tell us about one startup, developer or entrepreneur you're watching closely and why?
Casey Roloff: I think Cul de Sac. Ryan Johnson, we've actually talked, but I love what they're doing at Cul de Sac. I actually see Cul de Sac, that model being a piece of the puzzle of what we're also talking about. Building a high density town center. He's got 700 units on 17 acres, I believe is the math on that. I see that as being a great way to start more of a mid-sized city but creating that energy, that density. Now Trilith, for example, has, they, they plop down 500 multifamily units right in their town center, and they're one of the first to do that early on which really energized their town center, which drives up the real estate values of the 5,000 square foot lots and the 4,000 square foot [00:39:00] lots. People that are buying more expensive homes need that energy.
Brad Hargreaves: I love it. I love what Ryan's doing as well. It's a super cool project. So next question.
When you and I are recording this podcast 10 years from now, so in the mid 2030s, what is the most important real estate topic we'll be discussing and why?
Casey Roloff: Eliminating the car. I just think that the amount of infrastructure we put in place for the car is astronomical. I don't know if Donald Shoup from UCLA, he actually just passed away.
Brad Hargreaves: Yeah, he did.
Casey Roloff: The high cost of free parking, you know, that there's six parking spaces for every vehicle in America, yet we have a housing crisis. That's insane. And so I think it's just gonna be further and further eliminating the infrastructure for the vehicle over this next 20 to 30 years and obviously that creates a lot of opportunity in cities and suburban areas if we're removing a lot of that infrastructure.
Brad Hargreaves: Super interesting. I know it's been a big topic of debate in my own New York over the past as long as I can remember. Other than [00:40:00] Seabrook what is one city or place you would bet on?
Casey Roloff: City? I think Seattle's an amazing city. Gotten knocked down through COVID, but anybody that's spent some time in Seattle, it's just such a spectacular city. Yes there's popular cities like Nashville and Austin. The natural landscape, this goes back to the best of both worlds, like having the most incredible natural landscape around you and then also having all that urbanity as well, is the best of both worlds. I think Seattle really epitomizes that ' cause you're looking out at the Olympic Mountains, you've got Mount Rainier. Every time I drive into Seattle, it like shocks me how big this mountain is and you're in the city. So I think Seattle is just an incredible place that will just continue to be a place people are moving to in the future.
Brad Hargreaves: I think if you were to ask me to pick a city and a month combo of the best city in the US in any month, it would be Seattle in July. I think there's no place more [00:41:00] beautiful, certainly in the United States than Seattle in July. It gets a bad rap for nine of the other 12 months, but it's Seattle in July. There's no better place in the US.
Casey Roloff: On that note if you look at the happiest places to live in the world, they're in similar climates. Hawaii is a really happy place, but you look at the Scandinavian countries, they're some of the happiest places to live and their environment is even harsher than the Northwest. So I think it has more to do with the built environment, and I do think we get a bad rap for our weather. Again I've grown up here. I love it. I love other places around the country, but I just think Seattle has a really bright future.
Brad Hargreaves: Love it. Final question. What's your favorite app on your home screen?
Casey Roloff: On my home screen? That's a tough one. I would say Amazon. I'm embarrassed to say that, but I don't have a lot of time and so when I need something basic, it is too easy.
Brad Hargreaves: It is too easy in good ways and bad. Yes. I love it. Casey, thank you so much for joining the show today. Really enjoyed this conversation [00:42:00] and I am inspired by what you're building.
So thanks so much for coming on.
Casey Roloff: Thank you so much, Brad. Love being on.
Brad Hargreaves: I hope you all really enjoyed listening into that story, Casey Roloff telling a bit about how he built Seabrook to what it is and where he is taking it from. Here, please join us next week as well. We are going to have on Jamie Hodari for one of his first interviews after CBRE's acquisition of Industrious.
He's the co-founder and CEO of Industrious, now taking on a much, much bigger role within CBRE - really one of the most influential people out there on the future of office and how we work and a good friend and overall good guy, so please join us next week.
See you all then.
Share this post