Todd Collins got into commercial real estate the old-fashioned way by buying a single-tenant rental property and gradually taking on bigger projects. Having generational wealth akin to many large real-estate firms would have been nice, but that wasn’t in the cards for Collins.
“We’re slow but steady investors, and we try to buy assets where we can make a difference,” he says, citing his long-term ownership of older apartment buildings that serve a working-class clientele. Red Hill now has holdings in Charlotte and Austin, Texas, and expects to add a 75,000-square-foot industrial building in Raleigh.While some of its apartment tenants struggled during the early stages of the pandemic, Red Hill has done fine and benefited from having limited debt, Collins says.
Before starting his company, Collins, 48, was a consultant for nearly a decade at Accenture in Atlanta, which exposed him to many different types of businesses. That experience underscores his desire to diversify beyond real-estate investment and create a fund to help other entrepreneurs get off the ground. His non-real-estate ventures include The City Kitch, a shared-used community kitchen in west Charlotte with plans to expand statewide, and Nationwide Court Systems, which helps automate evictions, tax appeals and other court transactions.
Being viewed as a minority-owned business gets old but is understandable, says Collins, who has a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College and an MBA from George Washington University.
“We’re just trying to be a great real-estate firm and look more to the day when we aren’t an anomaly. That’s why we have a fund to help more businesses grow so it isn’t a rarity. There are a lot of minority businesses that are doing well, but nobody is writing about them. We are investing in some of those.”