The Big Long
How Going Big on an Outrageous Idea Transformed the Real Estate Industry
In 2008, with housing prices in free fall, even experienced investors wouldn’t go near the single-family rental (SFR) home market. It was too unmanageable, too hard to scale.
According to the experts, SFR wasn’t even a real asset class.
But Doug Brien and Colin Wiel looked at the homes of the Bay Area’s working class communities and saw something different. They saw an opportunity not just to build a profitable business, but to transform residential real estate, establish SFR as a legitimate institutional investment, and restore devastated neighborhoods.
The Big Long is the story of how two friends defied pundits, doomsayers, and house-flippers to “go long” on a revolutionary business idea. Through FBI investigations, financial reversals, and a pandemic, they endured to build the SFR industry’s pioneering company, Waypoint.
The Big Long shows that wealth and success don’t come from short-sale thinking and meme stocks but from committing to a vision and going BIG.
Colin Wiel
An engineer, artificial intelligence patent-holder, and serial entrepreneur, Wiel began his career at Boeing, where he designed algorithms to improve automatic control systems on airplanes. After running a Java programming consultancy that built early e-commerce systems like Charles Schwab’s online trading website, Wiel partnered with Brien to launch Waypoint Homes in 2009. Wiel led the tech, M&A, and fundraising teams at Waypoint all the way to the NYSE, where Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust (SWAY) debuted its IPO in 2014.
Doug Brien
A former Super Bowl-winning NFL placekicker, Brien got his start in real estate following the collapse of the housing market in early 2009, when he and Colin Wiel began buying single-family homes to renovate and rent out. Together, they were able to scale an industry of mom-and-pop shops into a more than $3 billion portfolio of over seventeen thousand single-family home rentals (SFR) that attracted institutional investors and competition from private equity firms. With the success of their company, Waypoint Homes, Wiel and Brien defied critics to put SFRs on the map as a profitable and scalable financial asset class.