When Matthew Whitaker began flipping homes in the Birmingham metro in 2004, the single-family real estate market was hot.

In fact, Whitaker flipped around 100 Magic City homes between 2004-2007, and that is when the real estate crash and the ensuing Great Recession left the entrepreneur with around 30 homes that he could not sell.

Matthew Whitaker of gkhouses.com has announced the company’s expansion to Nashville.

“I owned about 30 rental houses when the market crashed in late ’07 and basically said we can’t sell these houses based on what we have in them anymore,” Whitaker told the Alabama Center for Real Estate recently. “We found ourselves essentially in the property management business. We couldn’t sell them so we had to rent them.”

Whitaker had other friends in the real estate business who were in the same boat, and he was able to aggregate around 70 homes to manage and rent. By 2012, that number had grown to around 300 homes, and over the past three years, his company, gkhouses.com, has tripled in size to nearly 1,200 rental homes.

Whitaker is a member of ACRE’s Leadership Council. To learn more about the Leadership Council, click here.

In April, Whitaker and gkhouses.com announced the company is expanding to Nashville. The company currently has plans to share space with Oak Hill area RE Max Masters office, according to the Birmingham Business Journal.

We had a chance to sit down with Whitaker recently to talk about his company’s growth over the past eight years in Birmingham and why Nashville was the natural destination for the gkhouses.com’s expansion.

ACRE: Why has gkhouses.com decided to expand in 2016? 

Whitaker: We had always wanted to grow a regional management company. That wasn’t the goal from day one, but once we realized we enjoyed managing and we could make a living managing, we said, this is something we want to do. And we want to create the systems and processes here in Birmingham that we can duplicate elsewhere. I’ve spent about the last two to two-and-half years with our team making sure our systems and processes are in place.

ACRE: What are those systems and processes that made this expansion possible?  

Whitaker: It didn’t matter if we were in Calera, Nashville, downtown Birmingham or elsewhere. Our systems and processes and our ability to aggregate the back office would be the same. Everything we do is web-based now, and everything is just a change from the old model of paper and filing cabinets and the old way of doing things. It’s much more efficient. Most of our work takes place on a computer now.

ACRE: Why did you guys pick Nashville as the first city for the expansion?   

Whitaker: I call Nashville the new Atlanta. When I was getting out of college in ’02, Atlanta was where everybody went to in the “big city” to get a job. Now it feels like all of the Millennials are going to Nashville. I read a statistic that 80 new people move every day to Nashville. That to me says there’s opportunity there.

ACRE: A lot of those people moving to the Music City are Millennials. How much of an impact did that have on your decision to open an office there?   

Whitaker: I think a lot of those are Millennials, and I also think Millennials will rent today longer than we did in the past. I got out of school, got a job and bought a house. Millennials don’t see the kind of corporate ladder that I saw, where I was just going to be in Birmingham and work out of Birmingham. They understand that they may have to jump from graduating from Tuscaloosa or Auburn and going to Nashville, going to Charlotte and going to Atlanta, and that’s the way they’re going to climb the corporate ladder. The last thing they want is something that ties them to that city, where “I can’t go take that job because I can’t sell this house.” It creates more risk for them.

ACRE: What sets gkhouses.com apart from other property management firms?   

Whitaker: There’s three questions that homeowners ask when they come to see us. How quickly can you rent my home? How do you keep from renting it to the wrong person? How much do you cost? After they call us, their needs shift. Then it becomes all about trust. In order to build trust with the homeowner, we have be good at communicating what’s going on. About two-thirds of our owners don’t live in Alabama, so they may be in another state or another country, so our ability to communicate what’s going on with their house builds trust with them. The three things that separate us are communication, uncomfortable transparency – if we screw something up, we’re going to be transparent about the fact that we screwed it up. If we have to write a check to fix it, that’s what we’re going to do, but we’re going to make sure we never hurt that trust with that homeowner. The third thing is we celebrate the tenant. We actually got (the last one) from a property manager in Atlanta. A home is an asset, but that’s one piece of the puzzle. The second piece of the puzzle is a good tenant. The tenants who are doing things correctly, we’re going to celebrate those tenants and do certain things to make them appreciate that they are renting from gkhouses.

ACRE: Can we expect more gkhouses.com expansion announcements in the near future?  

Whitaker: We’re actually looking at Knoxville, Chattanooga, Louisville (Kentucky) and maybe Memphis. We do have a goal to be in another city by the end of the year.