Leader-to-Leader Program Overview

(All events at Westin Anaheim Resort)

Monday, May 22
2:00pm — Badge pickup, networking, refreshments
3:00pm — Chairman’s Welcome
3:15pm — Housing Market Outlook
3:45pm — Trends in Capital Markets
4:30pm — The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
5:30-7:00pm — Chairman’s Reception

Tuesday, May 23
7:30am — Breakfast
8:30am — Eleni Kounalakis, Lieutenant Governor of California
9:10am — What’s Our Problem? Understanding Social, Political & Group Dynamics
10:00am — Break
10:20am — The Math, Mechanics and Makeup of Build-for-Rent Communities
11:05am — Trends in Marketing, Consumer Behavior, and Generational Shifts
12:00pm — Lunch
1:00pm — Leadership Conversation with Leonard Miller
1:30pm — Catalyzing Innovation with Clark Ivory
2:30pm — Break
2:45pm — Closing Keynote: Conquering Chaos
3:45pm — Forum Wrap Up
4:00pm — Adjourn

Speaker Biographies


Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis was sworn in as the 50th Lieutenant Governor of California by Governor Gavin Newsom on January 7th, 2019. From 2010 to 2013, Kounalakis served as President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the Republic of Hungary. Prior to her public service, Kounalakis was president of one of California’s most respected housing development firms, AKT Development, where she worked for 18 years. She built master-planned communities and delivered quality housing to the Sacramento region’s working families.


Jake Wood is a decorated Marine and co-founder of Team Rubicon, a nonprofit that recruits, trains and deploys military veterans to disaster zones around the world. The Team Rubicon effort began in 2010 with a small team spontaneously responding to the devastating earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Since then, it has grown to nearly 30,000 volunteers across 785 field operations—providing much-needed aid and healing not only to disaster victims, but also to the veterans themselves, many of whom still carry scars (seen and unseen) from their service. At Leader-to-Leader, Jake will share hard-won lessons on leadership, risk, adaptation, and building more agile organizations.


Peter Zeihan is an expert in geopolitics: the study of how place impacts financial, economic, cultural, political and military developments. He helps corporations, governments, investors and NGOs make sense of the global forces shaping our world. He’s a bestselling author of four highly-acclaimed books, and is regularly featured in major media publications and broadcasts, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, AP, Bloomberg, CNN, ABC, The New York Times, Fox News and MarketWatch. Always insightful and irreverent, Zeihan will explore the massive shifts playing out before us, and why "The End of the World is Just the Beginning."


Clark Ivory is CEO of Ivory Homes, ProBuilder’s 2021 Builder of the Year, and an industry leader in driving innovation, sustainability, affordability, and community engagement. Deeply focused on continual improvement, Ivory Homes has been Utah’s largest home builder every year since 1990. In 2017, Clark helped launch Ivory Innovations, a nonprofit organization that catalyzes innovative solutions in housing affordability. He also served as director of the Salt Lake City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank from 2006 to 2011.


Tim Urban is a popular thinker, blogger, author and illustrator whose fanbase includes the likes of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Driven by an infectious curiosity and armed with hundreds of hours of research, he unravels mysteries about our world and humanity with a captivating blend of deep intellect and sharp humor. His latest book, What’s Our Problem?, introduces a new framework for understanding societies, politics, group dynamics, and our own minds.


Linda Mamet is Chief Marketing Officer for Tri Pointe Homes, where she leads the company's integrated sales and marketing strategies and shapes its premium lifestyle brands. Linda has also been instrumental in hosting Tri Pointe's Think Tanks and Summits, bringing together cross-functional team members to plan for the future of home building, and pursuing innovation from outside of the industry – from understanding Millennials and Baby Boomers to digital life, leading retail and customer experience strategies, smart homes, autonomous vehicles and more.


Stephanie McCarty is Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Taylor Morrison. In this role, she has transformed the company culture and branding position nationwide, helped catapult Taylor Morrison to one of the country's largest residential homebuilders, led efforts resulting in recognition as America's Most Trusted Home Builder seven years running, and positioned Taylor Morrison among the first-movers in advancing new-home shopping with innovative, industry-leading customer acquisition tools.


No one peers into the hearts and minds of American consumers quite like J. Walker Smith, described by Fortune as "one of America's leading analysts on consumer trends." As chief knowledge officer for Kantar Consulting, he consults with clients globally about trends, futures, marketing and business strategy.


Leonard Miller is CEO of BrightSky Residential, a Resmark company founded in 2022 to source, develop and manage purpose-built single-family rental communities. Before founding BrightSky, he was president and CEO of The New Home Company. In his former positions at both The New Home Company and, before that, Richmond American Homes, he led his teams to become #1 in the nation for positive buyer experiences. Miller is a 2023 inductee into the California Homebuilding Foundation Hall of Fame.


Rodney Montag has been in homebuilding his entire career, first as a builder, then as a developer, then as an investor. Trained as an architect, he has purchased, financed, entitled, developed, built and/or sold over 100 projects totaling approximately 40,000 residential units. Rodney is the CEO and Managing Partner of RAM, which he founded in 2014. He is responsible for the day-to-day oversight of the business including new business origination, capital raising, and investor relations.


Andrew Brausa is Managing Director at Brookfield Asset Management, responsible for leading the Homebuilder Capital platform as well as pursuits under the Land & Housing sector. He is primarily responsible for sourcing, underwriting and managing financing opportunities in the residential for-sale real estate market and the broader Land & Housing portfolio. Prior to joining Brookfield in 2017, Andrew held senior investment roles at various global firms focused on the real estate sector across credit, equity and special situations.


Aimee Martin is a Senior Director of Acquisitions at GTIS Partners, where she's responsible for the origination of new residential land development and homebuilding investments in multiple markets throughout the US. She has over 25 years of diversified real estate experience in equity and debt investments, asset management and project finance, development and operations. She is a skilled strategist and problem solver with a track record of value creation in residential projects across the country.


Tom Farrell is an industry veteran with more than 30 years of real estate finance experience across most geographies and layers of the capital stack. His current position is SVP/Division Manager of the Homebuilder Finance Division of Umpqua Bank, a $54B commercial bank headquartered in Portland, OR. Prior to Umpqua Tom was with Sabal Financial Group as the Director of Home Builder Finance, where he formed a start-up homebuilder finance group providing A&D and construction loans to homebuilders nationally. Before Sabal, Tom was at Bank of America for 25 years in the Real Estate Industries Group, the last several years running the Homebuilder Finance Group nationally.


Mark Wolf is founder and CEO of AHV Communities, a San Antonio-based pioneer and leader in its trademarked Built-for-Rent single-family rental home communities. Over the course of his 20+ year career, he has been directly involved in the acquisition, development, construction financing and lease up of over 12,000 multifamily units requiring $3 billion in capitalization.


Branden Lombardi is president of BB Living, the leading developer and operator of single-family build-to-rent communities, headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. As a pioneer in the BTR space, BB Living built more than 1,000 rental homes in Phoenix before forming a national partnership with Toll Brothers and a leading private equity fund to expand the platform nationally in 2018.


Steven LaTerra is CEO of TerraLane Communities, joining the company shortly after its founding in 2019. He is responsible for all aspects of the company’s operations and is a member of the Investment Committee. He focuses his efforts on the evaluation of new opportunities, portfolio management and investor/partner relations. Prior to joining the company, he was the Managing Director of Meyers Research, where he was the lead analyst on horizontal apartment opportunities throughout the US.


With his trademark energy, insight and humor, Leader-to-Leader facilitator Tim Sullivan ties the entire program together, drawing connections and takeaways from the many diverse topics and perspectives. As senior managing principal at Zonda, Tim has more than 36 years’ experience in analyzing and valuing real estate development opportunities across the U.S. and Latin America—with an ability to interpret diverse statistics and trends and translate them into actionable plans.


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