Welcome to Buy Box
Hi everyone… and if we haven’t met, great to meet you!
I’m Paul Stanton, partner at Thesis Driven, a leading media, education, and data platform covering the future of the built world. I’m also a partner at PTB, a real estate investment banking boutique.
My partner, Brad Hargreaves, is the founder and editor-in-chief of Thesis Driven, and formerly the founder of Common (largest coliving operator in the US, merged with Habyt in 2023) and General Assembly (acquired by Adecco in 2018 for $400+ million).
At Thesis Driven, we’re great at high-level, impartial analysis of real estate concepts, themes, capital structures and operators.
But we’re not totally impartial journalists: Brad and I are investors ourselves, and we occasionally make personal investments in the concepts and operators we cover.
So we started Buy Box to document our personal journey investing in high-growth real estate ventures.
In 2025, we invested in:
a 30-unit ski home community in Driggs;
an off-the-grid campgrounds platform; and
a small town in the Catskills.
Now, with Buy Box, our investing adventures will be public—sharing the sponsors we’re meeting, asset classes we’re studying, the deal structures we’re negotiating… and the potholes we’re stepping in along the journey. In the coming weeks, we’ll dive deeper into the themes and deals we’re currently circling.
Ep 1. Real estate venture investing—betting on people + projects
Every week, we’ll break down investment structures, deals, operators, themes and markets we think are interesting via short videos.
For this first week, we’re sharing how we think about generating venture-like returns in real estate, with downside protection of real assets.
Over the last 3 years, we’ve gotten a front row seat to how the most sophisticated, private real estate investors in the world—large family offices, hedge funds and entrepreneurial allocators—are funding high growth, early stage platforms targeting 4-10X returns.
It’s a space institutions can’t yet access (not enough track record and/or requires flexible hold periods that don’t meet their rigid mandates), and requires the ability to underwrite both the teams and the projects. And, it’s a lot more fun!
Real estate venture investing is one of the key themes we’ll be pursuing through Buy Box in the months ahead as we share the themes, asset classes and operators we’re researching regularly.
