On real estate Twitter/X, Donovan Adesoro seems like a rock star.
Not only did he break into development on his own at age 23, he did it on hard mode: Building affordable duplexes on infill scatter sites across less affluent parts of Houston, a city Adesoro didn't know well at the time, against the backdrop of the pandemic. Yet he flourished. He got over a dozen projects underway within a year and he's only ramped up his output from there. (In the spring of 2026, he hit his 41st exit and he still has ten more in the pipeline for the year.)
Open and transparent from day one, Adesoro's highly visible success arguably helped jumpstart Houston's now active and inventive "missing middle" housing development scene. It also helped him land his current role as head of development for BuildCasa, an award-winning startup that finds California homeowners with big yards, matches them with developers interested in buying and building up this space, and speed runs the process of subdividing and entitling these lots. As of 2026, Adesoro and BuildCasa have about 30 projects underway across the state – and in the future the company hopes to make a dent in California's massive affordable housing shortage.
And he's still only 29 years old.
But Adesoro's quick to downplay his meteoric rise. It's not like he got into real estate with a genius master plan, he told GPLetters. He actually started out with no idea what he was doing, and nearly crashed and burned several times. Any new developer can achieve as much as he has, Adesoro argues, if they have basic problem solving skills, a bit of luck, and solid motivation.
For Adesoro, that motivation came in the form of a gradual realization that the white collar life he spent his youth working towards wasn't what he'd hoped it'd be. That he needed to make a change – to do anything else. And that his best bet, with the assets he had, would be rolling the dice on real estate.
Adesoro grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in what he calls "a run-of-the-mill poverty situation." He had a good family, but his parents never made more than $25 an hour and he had to share a room with his two brothers until he moved out. "I had friends who did this and that and saw people around me go to jail," he recalls. "So I was very intentional about, like, 'How do I get out of this situation and not become, basically, another statistic.'"
"I actually wanted to become a lawyer," he says. But he knew he'd have to take out student loans to afford college, and he couldn't stomach the prospect of stacking grad school debt on top of undergrad debt. So "I Googled 'what's the highest-paying major with a four-year degree.'"
It was petroleum engineering.