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Hi! John Blatchford here.

Maybe you know me from X orLinkedIn, or my work developing historic buildings with Kunst.

Or from my private Member Group of real estate GPs, Cohorts.

In any case - I'm glad you're here.

I started GPLetters to tell the story of people building great real estate companies. The behind-the-scenes stuff you rarely read about.

How did this person, place, and company come to be? How have they grown their company, finance deals? How have they failed and what's motivating them?

I want for you to learn more about how people are building wonderful real estate and companies, so that maybe you can apply that to your business and life.

To be sure - this is written by and for real estate people. But unlike a lot of CRE writing, we care a lot more about the person/place/story than the refinancing package or terms of a loan or whatever.

We'll tell you about an insane $100M condo project in Miami, who built it, how they got to that position, how it was designed. We don't care, really, that it reached an 8.3% yield.

And on a deeper level, I want to tell the personal stories of real estate and development. There are people like you and I building homes, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores. Providing the places we live, cook, eat, sleep, and make lifelong memories. Shaping cities and restoring the past.

It's a beautiful thing and their story should be told beautifully.

Deep profiles, beautifully-written.

It's hard to know exactly what you're getting when you read something online. So here are some standards you can count on.

GPLetters standards:

  • A+ photography and long-form editorial. Our editor and main writer, Mark, comes from previous stints at VICE, National Geographic, and Forbes. Oxford + Columbia. The real deal. Deep profiles and hiring the best photographers to tell these stories.
  • No AI - we write GPLetters ourselves, from our brains, in Word docs and email exchanges. We work to keep high journalistic standards and write like humans.
  • Generally positive, seeking out the beauty and success stories, and "pro-real estate" - not looking to write takedowns, lawsuits, foreclosures.
  • But not puff pieces. If somebody is accused of something, we will go into it and ask them directly. We'll check their claims on returns, sales, funds raised. We fact check and write what we find. We aim to cover people and companies fairly.
  • No sponsors, no paid posts, no ads. GPLetters is free to read, we cover our subjects objectively, and nobody can pay to be featured or shown positively. We remain independent.
  • Not Too Bad for A Tech Guy - Val Katayev made millions of dollars in tech in his 20s, retired by 32, got bored, and started building condos. $250M in projects later he's just getting started.
  • Bobby Wants More Babies - Bobby Fijan's American Housing Corporation has raised millions to build rowhomes from their Texas factory. Fijan just hopes to save American cities by filling them with kids.
  • Like a Ton of Bricks - Austin Tunnell built a career in real estate around his dream for beautiful brick buildings. Then life knocked him into survival mode to figure out what he - and his company - were really all about.
  • The French Experience - Isaac French grew up in a family of builders. As a child, he dreamed of creating his own little worlds. After a $7M exit is his mid-20s, he's become the face of a new trend in hospitality: The micro-resort movement.

Thanks for being here. I hope to meet you soon.

John Blatchford

Founder - Kunst, Cohorts, GPLetters