By Blake McDonald.
It is unbelievable how much opportunity can come from one cold email. One email and a couple of online meetings with the Holladay team led me to move to a completely different city for the first time. I spent the summer working with an ambitious team that develops 100+ unit affordable housing communities.
Midway through the summer, I presented a detailed breakdown of the capital stack to the development team: debt, equity, and gap funding. I walked through set-asides for bond allocations, calculated how much equity an example deal would receive, and covered the different funding sources for filling the gap, from PBV and soft loans to grants and PILOTs. By that point, I had already worked with every piece of the capital stack in action, and the takeaway was clear. A deal can have a gap of millions of dollars and still get done. There are so many levers you can pull, and every one of them gets you a step closer to giving hundreds of residents a place to live.
That presentation was just one of many great learning experiences I had this summer. I helped complete three 4% tax credit and bond applications totaling 563 units. I supported grant applications totaling over $4 million. I built research reports across six states for our CEO, breaking down each state’s QAP priorities, award patterns, and gap funding sources.
I completed Evan Holladay’s Affordable Development Mastery Course: 59 lessons covering the full development process, from site selection and design to funding, financing, and underwriting. The course gave me the foundation to apply those skills on real deals. I put the site selection lessons to work by identifying sites that fit our criteria. I then called brokers and landowners to inquire about availability and pricing. I sat in on weekly design calls with our MEP, civil, architecture, and GC partners, where every decision meant balancing function and appearance against a set unit mix and proforma budget. I completed initial underwriting on four potential deals, learning the right unit mix for a given site, construction type, hard costs, and where to pull rents and utility allowances. Most importantly, I learned how all the inputs in a proforma work and tie together.
Through it all, events with nonprofits like Rebuilding Together Nashville and Dream Streets kept the work grounded. Every line item in a proforma is a home someone will live in.
Thank you to Evan Holladay and the entire Holladay Ventures team for treating me like I had been part of the team for years. They trusted me with real tasks, challenged me, and taught me what it takes to build high-quality affordable housing.
If there is one lesson from this summer that will stick with me forever, it is this: do not be afraid to send that email or make that call. You never know where it might lead.