4 min read December 2023 — Invest: spoke with Payton Mayes, CEO of JPI, about being the largest multi-family developer in North Texas, partnering with the Sumitomo Corporation, and their recent exploration into the affordable housing sector. He said about that recent effort, “It is very important to provide high-quality housing for people that don’t qualify for the market rates of today. Only through private-public partnerships can we make that happen.”
What impact does JPI have on North Texas?
JPI was founded as a private company in 1989. It was a spinoff of a former public company. North Texas has always been our homebase, even though we have developed and grown across the United States. We have been the largest multi-family developer for the last seven years, and we are often rated as larger than the next largest developers combined. We have a big market share. We are different from our peers because we have a different business model. Our competitors may do a few projects in DFW and other local areas, but we tend to focus on a bigger market share of a select few areas. If you add up our operations in Texas and Southern California, we are the eighth largest developer in the country and the fastest growing (as rated by NMHC). DFW is a massive market that we are really excited about.
How are you finding opportunities given the current state of the industry?
Capital markets have made it more challenging than it was a year and a half ago. I believe this is where JPI has the opportunity to shine. A lot of investors get more risk averse when capital is less available and costs more. We are blessed and fortunate to have a long track record of delivering communities that have high resident demand, which often gives us preferred placement with investors. Smaller companies find it extremely tough to attract capital in this type of market. There is no place that I would rather be than at JPI in this environment. We look for opportunities to capitalize on innovation in our industry and that is the main thing we focus on. We also take a data-driven approach. That is the beauty of our model, and we have a large team that evaluates roughly 600 land sites in DFW annually. We want the best risk/return for our investors, and we like to work with forward-thinking cities that understand the importance of traditional market rate housing as well as affordable housing for our public servants like firefighters and teachers.
How do you maintain JPI’s strong standards and reputation?
We have added a couple of hundred associates over the last two years. Everything we do is all about the people. Our service today is better than it was a few years ago because we continue to add high-quality people to the team, and we continue to invest in doing things better. At one point, we decided to explore affordable housing. People can’t agree on many things, but they can agree that we have an affordable housing issue. We need to invest in new ways to think about these things, so we attracted some talent in 2020, and we are very pleased to be serving a different segment of residents alongside our traditional market rate residents. It is very important to provide high-quality housing for people that don’t qualify for the market rates of today. Only through private-public partnerships can we make that happen. It is in the public interests to have teachers, firefighters and other public servants live in the city. You don’t want them to have to drive an hour to their place of employment, so we believe this initiative is important because it helps us serve more residents.
JPI was recently acquired by the Sumitomo Corporation and will be operating autonomously within that organization. What does that mean for the organization, and what impact will that have on your clients?
Sumitomo is an excellent partner and we have developed a great relationship. The owners want to see JPI have a long life. They have invested over $200 million dollars at the project level to date. For JPI, Sumitomo respects our name and reputation. They don’t want to make any changes. They wanted to acquire the platform because they know we know how to invest in multi-family development projects, and we have a good track record. They have a very long-term perspective and were established 330 years ago. That is older than our country. I love that long-term focus. It is easy to open a newspaper and get down on the volatility when you are trying to make decisions in the short term. If you bet on America in the long term, it is going to be a good bet, and they have made a significant investment in the US over the last few years.
What is next for JPI?
We have attracted some very non-traditional talent to our team. They have an outside, non-construction perspective, and they bring a tremendous amount of experience that we can build on. We have a very fragmented market in construction, but we think we can do things better. Construction has become less efficient throughout the years, so we are excited about our team that can tackle that problem. This way we can serve more residents.
For more information, visit:
