Matt Buchalski has been in technology sales for almost 30 years. Today he's Head of Sales at Ownwell, scaling the commercial real estate and institutional investor side of the AI-driven property tax appeal business. He's also an active multifamily operator concentrated in North Texas. The bridge between the two halves of his life is that he treats both with the same operator discipline, and he's built his current life around being home for his kids after a hard divorce reshaped his priorities.

Matt got into real estate on a tuna fishing trip out of Long Island. A buddy who ran a mortgage company was self-managing a 50-property single family portfolio from his phone in the car between casts. Matt asked how. By early 2016 he had bought his first single family in New York. Ninety days later he bought his second in Texas. Eight months after that he bought his first multifamily in Arlington, walked into a hoarder unit on day one and an eviction on day two, exited the deal at a 300% return, and never looked back. Today the Buchalski portfolio is Arlington-heavy (a few miles from AT&T Stadium), with concentrations in Richardson and Garland, a student housing asset in Waco inside the Baylor bubble, and an RV storage facility in Cleburne south of Fort Worth that he added about a year ago.

What landed in this conversation:

1. Why the buy box shrank. In 2021 Matt and his partners bought 34 units across two adjacent deals and poured nearly $1M of CapEx into them ($30K a door). Today they wouldn't look at that deal. The market has changed: vacant units take longer to fill, rent growth is flat, and heavy value-add doesn't pencil the way it did. Current buy box is 80s product or newer, 70 to 250 doors, in family-safe submarkets where his partners would be comfortable bringing their kids on a Saturday. They want operational upside (rent and occupancy), not a million-dollar lift.
2. The HVAC tariff math. Two-and-a-half-ton HVACs that Matt was installing for $3,500 each in 2021 and 2022 ran $4,700 to $4,800 a few months ago, with more increases coming as tariffs work through the supply chain. Compound that with the two largest line items on every T12 (taxes and insurance) running uncontrollable while rent growth flattens or declines from new supply, and you understand why most operators are now in defensive mode on every utility contract, trash hauler, and property manager they touch.
3. Why Ownwell exists and why it's growing fast. CEO Colin DePace worked inside a billionaire family office and watched how the rich actually mitigate taxes at scale. He paired with CTO Joseph (PhD in computer science) and built an AI-first property tax appeal platform. 350,000 appeals in 2024 across seven states. On pace for 800,000 to 1,000,000 appeals in 2025. When Texas assessments came out a week before Matt and Ed recorded, Ownwell's team had already analyzed three-plus million properties across eight or nine counties to map what happened year over year. Matt's job is to take that engine into commercial and institutional accounts.
4. Property taxes in Texas are not what they were. The conventional wisdom used to be that Tarrant County would assess at 88% to 90% of purchase price times the mill rate. In 2023 the entire deck reshuffled. Counties moved to 100% of purchase price in year one. There are still levers: assets under $5M may qualify for a circuit breaker that caps growth at 20% year over year. Five or ten percent of variance in the single biggest line on the T12 is the difference between walking away from a 90% deal and doing the 100% deal. Matt's pitch to operators is that the freshness and accuracy of Ownwell's data is what makes that forecast actually reliable.

The advice that has stayed with Matt since he worked at a butcher shop in New Rochelle, New York as a 15-year-old: "First right, then quick. Don't worry about doing things fast until you know how to do them right." He's watched that lesson get violated for the last seven years inside every sales organization that thinks an automated email cadence can substitute for the upstream work. It can't.

On the personal side: after his divorce, Matt chose to be the parent who shows up over the parent on 150 nights of road. His son was warming up for a little league game one night and Matt asked his fiancée where she'd rather be. Nowhere. That's been his North Star ever since, and it's why real estate as a wealth vehicle matters to him: it lets him keep saying no to the CRO job that would put him back in airports.

Books on his nightstand: Untangled on raising teenage girls. Find it on Amazon. When Pride Still Mattered, the David Maraniss biography of Vince Lombardi. Find it on Amazon.

Get in touch: LinkedIn (Matt Buchalski). For property tax questions, matt@ownwell.com. For multifamily, matt@deepbluere.com.

Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, at clarkst.com/podcast or elevista.com/podcast

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