Starting Small podcast

Realberry: Chad McWhinney

23/10/2026
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Chad McWhinney was in seventh grade in 1986 when he and his fifth-grade brother Troy built a roadside strawberry stand at their grandparents’ mobile home park. They sold out both days of the first weekend. Within a few years, four brothers were running close to 30 stands across Southern California, with around 100 employees, plus pumpkins and Christmas trees in season. They even got city ordinances changed to keep the stands legal. In high school, Chad worked out a deal with his principal to leave class during the day to run the business, on the condition that his teachers came to tutor him at night.

After the 1991 Gulf War crushed sales, Chad enrolled in college, lasted about a week, and moved to Colorado after reading a Time magazine piece on a coming real estate boom in the Rockies. His dad offered to sell him the family’s inherited farmland in Loveland at appraised value, on one condition: he had to move back and become part of the community. Chad and Troy ended up assembling options on 28 neighboring farms, around 3,300 acres, at depressed agricultural prices.

By the time they had to close, the market had come back. That land became Centerra. From there they went from land investors to full vertical developers, building master-planned communities, apartments, industrial, and hotels. The defining project was the restoration of Denver Union Station, completed in 2014, along with The Crawford Hotel inside it. The company now manages $3.4 billion in assets across seven states, has paid out $481 million in cumulative distributions, and is working on the revival of the Cal Neva at Lake Tahoe after more than 120 neighborhood meetings. For nearly 35 years the company carried the family name, McWhinney.

In early 2026 it became Realberry, a nod to where it all started, and it opened its doors to investors writing checks closer to $100,000 instead of the $1 million-plus it used to require.

Make sure to check out Realberry at: https://www.realberry.com

 

Join us live at the Starting Small Summit 2027 on Wednesday, Feb 17, at the Everest-Rohrer Auditorium in Mishawaka, IN. The lineup is Charlie Clifford (TUMI, ROAM), Hap Klopp (The North Face), Shahab and Durana Elmi (Cymbiotika), and Chuck Surack (Sweetwater).

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