From One Family Building to $3 Billion

Dwight Dunton, Founder and Chief Executive Officer

This quarter, Bonaventure crossed $3 billion in assets under management. When I started the company, it was just me. Today more than 600 families invest with us. What has not changed is how we invest: we protect the downside first, we invest side by side with our partners, and losing principal is the only cardinal sin.

It started with one building. In 1999, our family's partners told us that our only real asset, an apartment community built on what had been our family's farm, was a C-class property in a C-class location that needed $5 million of capital. We did not have $5 million. I was 25 and had never owned real estate. I told my dad I would buy them out. He said okay.

Investing our own money taught me the lesson behind every decision since: when it is your money, you cannot talk yourself into something foolish. Three principles follow from it.

Those principles took us from one building to 9,725 units, and they are how we will keep investing. Today we are small enough to know our partners by name and large enough to have institutional capabilities working for them.

The calls I like best are thank-you calls. An investor thanks me for a vacation home, or for sending a grandchild to college. I did not buy the house or pick the school. But we helped them feel financially able to make a commitment they had worked toward for years.

None of this happens without our team, our residents, and the partners who trust us with their capital. Our reputation is the most important asset we own. No one can take it from us. We can only give it away.