Not your typical
property manager.
Not even close.

An engineer who learned
to think in probabilities.

I graduated from Penn State with an Industrial Engineering degree and a business minor. I was trained to solve complex systems — to find inefficiencies, model outcomes, and optimize. I just never expected to apply that to a poker table.

I started playing poker in college, progressively getting better, losing money the first five years while most people would have quit. Then I found the right people, the right framework, and something clicked. Within 2 years I was making more than triple any engineering salary I could have taken, so I decided to play full time — even though everyone told me I was making a ridiculous decision.

I earned half of my winnings playing 1-on-1 — heads up poker, the most aggressive and intense format. Pure math, pure psychology, pure edge.

I played with some of the best in the world. Sat across from Johnny Chan multiple times. Competed at the highest stakes the game had to offer. And I learned something that most people never do: the difference between a good decision and a lucky outcome.

I made the calculated bet that poker was the right path for me. It was — but little did I know that 2 years in, the US government would do something that would change my entire life path...

When the government
forced my next move.

In 2011, the US government shut down the major online poker sites and locked up 90% of my money as part of their pursuit of the platforms. Almost overnight, at age 25, I had to make a decision most people never face.

I moved abroad. For six years I lived and played across the world — poker took me to 70 countries, living in maybe 10 of them. I bounced from country to country with 2 laptops and 2 monitors, playing the highest stakes while feeling like I was living in a movie.

Eventually the industry changed. Solvers got better. High-stakes games dried up. The edge that had made the career possible was narrowing for everyone.

I decided to hang up the mouse for good, going from high stakes crusher to semi-retired overnight — 80-100 hours weekly to 0 hours. I moved to Miami and spent a year wondering what my next move was, and then it hit me. I had always been intrigued by the potential of real estate, but the returns of normal rentals didn’t do it for me — challenge and money wise. And then it clicked. I had stayed in over 70 Airbnbs during those travel years, so I began to dig into the STR game, looking at all the data I could get my hands on as if it were a game of poker.

The inefficiencies were everywhere. Nobody was running real pricing models. Nobody was treating it like a data problem. Everyone was copying each other and calling it management.

The same edge.
Different table.

What I brought to STR wasn’t a property management background. It was a decade of solving games that most people thought were unsolvable. The analytical framework is identical.

I know which data matters and which doesn’t. I know how to build a pricing model that accounts for demand elasticity, booking windows, and event-driven spikes. I know how to automate the right things and stay hands-on where it matters.

I learned higher-level math — algebra, calculus — at 7 years old. Numbers have never been abstract to me. They’re just a language for understanding what’s actually happening.

I’m calm under pressure. I know when I’m making the right play. I’m not scared of a difficult market or a problem that doesn’t have an obvious answer — I’m drawn to it.

The goal was never to be the biggest STR company. It was to build the most analytically rigorous one. To do for short-term rentals what I did at the poker table — find the edge that everyone else is missing and push it as hard as possible.

Daniel “Jungleman” Cates — widely regarded as the world’s #1 poker player — trusted us with his Las Vegas condos. He recognized the same analytical edge he uses at the table, applied to his portfolio. The result was a 52% revenue increase verified against his prior year — and our properties consistently run 20-30% above comparable listings across every market we operate in.