Founder's Letter

In September of 2016, my friends got together after class to strategize about securing our senior year off campus apartments. Like most upperclassmen, we had outgrown dorm life, but wanted to stay connected to our friends.

We had to live on Wash Ave or Kingsbury – the only neighborhood of private apartment buildings between our friends still living on campus and the Delmar Loop. There were some other pockets still nearby, but none of them had the neighborhood feeling. It was the unofficial Senior campus.

Our plan was to take one of the old charming 6-unit apartment buildings for ourselves, but there was massive competition for the few viable options. At the time, there was only one property manager for these buildings, and he was notoriously difficult to reach.

The property manager would open leasing at a random time on a random day with a single email blast. All the best buildings would fill within 24 hours. Drama always ensued. Rivalries formed between different friend groups. Fractures formed inside those friend groups.

Like all good WashU students, we nervously overprepared. We sorted out our class schedules and devised an on-call system so one of us could be ready at a moment's notice. When the email dropped, we had someone ready to race to the management office and put down the deposits for all 6 apartments at once.

Our senior year home was magical because we were motivated to make the most of each day knowing the clock was ticking on our college experience.

Parties materialized with a couple texts in our group chats. Late night munchies were satisfied with frozen pizzas or a short walk to the loop. The next day, nobody missed brunch because we would waltz into each other's rooms to wake each other up, excited to start another day in paradise.

Of course, it was not just parties and pizza and brunch. We studied and secured jobs too. Always sitting together at the Apt. 2W dining table. Life's circumstances could not yet separate us.

At graduation time, our families came to town, and we decided to give them the college experience. We drove stakes into the ground and wrapped a vinyl fence around the backyard. We ran the grill, set up games, and celebrated our last hoorah.

Like many of my friends, I was not looking forward to my upcoming office job – so much so that I was hatching a new housing plan. The "investors" (aka friends' parents) were drinking beers in the backyard of one of the buildings I hoped to buy and renovate.

The opportunity was too obvious. Though our experience was magical, the actual apartment itself was crusty. The service was non-existent. The water heater leaked for months. One stove burner actually lit. The bathroom door would not latch. Nobody answered the phone. We mostly just accepted that the price of privacy, freedom, and fun was a crappy apartment and an absent landlord.

The office job was just as bad as I thought. Nobody was waltzing into my room to wake me up for brunch. Though I should have been working, I was browsing apartment building listings. I found a four-unit building on Kingsbury, called the "investors," and quit my office job. I found an old architect that also went to WashU, and we planned to build the perfect boutique student housing apartment building.

Covid came shortly thereafter. Everything changed. Privacy, freedom, and dignity took on a whole new significance. Nobody wanted to live in a dorm with random roommates and an RA policing your every move. Nobody wanted to live inside a box in a corporate landlord's disconnected mega-complex.

Clock Tower Company was perfectly timed to deliver a high quality boutique housing service inside charming brick buildings thoughtfully rebuilt from the inside out. I moved alone back to Saint Louis full time, and worked feverishly to scale the company, but I never met the demand.

In May 2026, 8 years after graduating, our home-grown company acquired its 15th building. The largest has 67 apartments. The smallest has 3. We stayed disciplined and stuck to one neighborhood. All the buildings are within short walking distance of each other and WashU's campus.

We've received numerous offers to sell or expand to other Universities. We won't do either. Our company is successful because we stick to one product type, one neighborhood, and one customer – WashU students. With this narrow and deep focus, honing in on true, sustained value creation is not easy, but it is simple: long term projects, long term partnerships, genuine student feedback, and a real sense of community – built slowly, in one neighborhood, for one school.