Clay Grubb | CEO | Speaker | Author
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Clay Grubb was born to be in real estate. He began collecting mortgages for Grubb Properties, his father’s housing company, at age 12. Clay’s father built single-family homes in redline neighborhoods, offering financing to families who could not secure loans from the banks of 1960s North Carolina.
In those formative first years in the business, Clay learned lessons in compassion and how precious the security of owning a home is. Today, Clay serves as the CEO of Grubb Properties. The business now focuses on multi-family housing and commercial properties. Though Grubb Properties has evolved in the past 50+ years, it still holds those values sacred.
Clay’s day-to-day priorities are in managing a business that closed over $2 billion in investment transaction in the past 25 years and owns 4 million commercial square feet of real estate. However, his mission is to spark an affordable housing revolution.
“There is no silver bullet to solve today’s housing affordability crisis,” Clay states. “We must face this problem with a balance of compassion and competence. The solution will require plenty of both, and the efforts of many.”
He refuses to allow for idle obedience to the status quo. Clay is devoted to finding novel ways to combat this issue. From directing money to help those affected by gentrification to establishing Emergency Lines of Credit, Grubb is pushing back against a broken system.
Clay earned his BSM in Finance and Economics from Tulane University and his JD from The University of North Carolina School of Law. He lives in Charlotte with his wife Deidre. They have two children, Davis and Rosalie.