The Big Long: How Going Big on an Outrageous Idea Transformed the Real Estate Industry

“This peek into (Wiel and Brien’s) story will fascinate entrepreneurs and investors alike.” —David Meerman Scott, WSJ bestselling author

In 2008, with housing prices in free fall, even experienced investors wouldn’t touch 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 else. 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 persevered 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.

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.

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.

In 2016, Brien and Wiel partnered again to create Mynd, a property management and real estate investing firm with more than eight thousand SFR units under management across twenty-five US markets. Last valued at $807 million by Silicon Valley venture capitalists in 2021, they’re going long again on Mynd and leaving it all out on the field.

Learn more at: www.thebiglong.com