On an average weekday morning at 5 a.m., homebuilding billionaire Pat Neal starts readying himself for work while mulling over the stock and bond markets. “Thought processes usually begin in the shower and are completed by 8:00 in the morning,” he says, and include asking himself: “‘What is the 10-Year T-Bill going to do today?’”
But Neal doesn’t hold any treasury bills. In fact, he doesn’t own any bonds at all—or any public stocks. He follows those markets to predict how their activities will impact the spending patterns of home buyers. As for himself, though, nearly all of his $1.2 billion fortune is parked in his homebuilding company Neal Communities, which has put up 25,000 houses, all in Florida.
“I like controlling my own future,” explains Neal, 76, who has been reinvesting in the business since founding it in 1970. “I don’t live an expensive lifestyle. And my retirement is my business. We don’t need [retirement funds] because we’re not going to retire.” When Neal—who pays himself a $150,000 salary—requires additional cash, he sells undeveloped home lots. He owns about 26,000, some in JVs or with his sons, and estimates their average value at $50,000 to $150,000 apiece.
Neal’s earliest forays into investing were more diversified. The former Florida state senator learned myriad ways to make a buck while growing up in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s and ‘60s: He bottled and sold detergent. He mowed lawns. He had paper routes. He used his truck to drive around a handful of peers and rent out their cleaning and hauling services. By the time he was in high school, he was earning thousands of dollars a year—sometimes more than his mother, a schoolteacher.
He made his first investment in the mid-1960s, around age 16: 100 shares of Iowa Beef Packers, the meatpacking pioneer. He remembers buying them for about $1,500 (roughly $15,400 in today’s dollars), or $15 a piece, in the mid-’60s. He held the stock until his sophomore year of college, when he estimates that he sold it for about $3,000 (around $26,900 today)—doubling his investment.
His luck didn’t hold. Neal’s first stockbroker encouraged him to invest in the Delta Corporation of America, a mobile home loan servicer based in Florida, in the early 1970s. He purchased 100 shares at $28. After briefly hitting $34.50 in October 1971, the stock tumbled following a bad earnings report and just kept falling. The broker encouraged Neal to lean in, so he did—right up until Delta dissolved in the middle of the decade. “He asked me to buy an average down at $14. I bought that, and I rode it down to $0.” (His broker left the business and became a butcher.)
Neal says he did “just as well” with his second broker, and so stopped buying into the market altogether after 1972. The strategy he now prefers is to invest solely in the industry that he knows best: homebuilding.
“My sons and I know more about land buying opportunities than anybody,” he says. “We spend our days driving properties, calling friends, watching the obituaries, listening to what’s happening, to make sure that we can make good land purchases. My investment strategy is to buy land ahead of growth.”
That tactic brought him one of his best-ever purchases: 1,087 acres at the LeBamby Hunting Preserve in Sarasota County, which he bought in the late 1980s for about $0.10 per square foot and sold in the ‘90s and early ‘00s. “They didn’t know the interstate was coming,” he says. “And when the adjoining roads got through, I was able to sell some of the property at $57 a square foot.” Another particularly big score came when he and his son John paid the City National Bank of Florida $6,000 an acre for a plot of land that was in foreclosure in 2014. He developed it and sold parts for $250,000 an acre last year: “They didn’t know the value of their property.”
“Investing is a knowledge business,” says Neal, who recommends the books of investors Seth Klarman and Peter Lynch for treatises supporting that motto. “Unique knowledge should allow you to have better than average returns.”