Andrew Keel

Mobile Home Park/Self-Storage Investor and Commercial Real Estate Syndicator

My father, Rick Keel, has been a small business owner and entrepreneur since I was a child, I'm pretty sure I’ve received my entrepreneurial drive from him. He bought and sold several businesses during my childhood years and seemed to always have enough time to coach little league baseball, basketball, and football, which I was very thankful for. My father has owned all types of small businesses including an office supply wholesale business, a commercial cleaning business, a soda, and snack vending machine business, and a hurricane shutter manufacturing business. He is one of my idols and I'm thankful for all that he and my mom have poured into my brothers and me to get us where we are today. We grew up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida. The home I grew up in included a large pool, jacuzzi, full-court basketball court, and tennis court. Around 2006, my father, ambitious for another successful venture, took out a second mortgage on our primary residence in order to fund a new business. Little did he and many others know that the housing market was at its peak and two years later the house would be worth about half of what it was at the time. My father's new business venture, which was directly correlated to the housing market, dwindled until my parents were forced into foreclosure and ultimately bankruptcy. I was in college in 2008 and witnessed firsthand the struggles my parents faced having to downsize from a larger life they once lived. I vowed to learn as much as possible about personal finance and real estate investing to ensure financial security.

I graduated in 2010 from Augustana University, located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota where I majored in Business Administration. I was fortunate enough to play varsity football at "Augie" for all four years that I attended on an athletic scholarship; I even managed to earn First Team All-Conference honors during my senior season. College was a great season of my life and I made friends in South Dakota that I will keep in touch with forever. During college, I completed several business internships, including time at Sanford Hospital as a health care administration intern and at Merrill Lynch as a Global Wealth Management Intern. I was working at Merrill Lynch on Sept. 29, 2008, which, at the time, was the date of the largest single-day drop in the Dow's history; this started my distrust of the traditional capital markets. I witnessed, firsthand, the chaos of financial advisors getting phone calls all day long from clients who had just lost a substantial piece of their planned retirement in a single day. 

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The cold Sioux Falls (SD) weather ultimately sent me back to the Sunshine State (FL) where I began my professional business career after a short stint playing American football professionally for the 'Northern Lights' overseas in Oulu, Finland. I started out my professional business career as a Sales Representative at an Orlando-based branding and marketing company, focused on branding small businesses. The company's primary focus was branding/ marketing for real estate agents and this was how I got my first exposure to real estate as a whole. Over the four years I was employed there I learned a lot and eventually became a Sales Manager traveling to over 152 Keller Williams offices around the United States. I sold over $1,000,000 in branding packages in 2014 and eventually left in 2015 to go into real estate full-time.