Charles Young spent part of his first year at Sun Communities going from California to New York, visiting RV resorts and talking with the people who ran them. There is a pleasing reversal in the itinerary. Guests go to these places to escape work. Their new chief executive went there to understand it.
The trip belongs in a career that has moved between several kinds of team. Young played professional football before entering business. He co-founded a management consultancy, worked at Goldman Sachs, helped develop residential real estate and became an operator of rental homes. In October 2025, he took over Sun Communities after Gary Shiffman's four decades of leadership. By then, changing organizations was familiar territory. Inheriting that much institutional memory was a particular assignment.
At Sun, based in Southfield, Michigan, his responsibilities span manufactured housing communities and outdoor vacation properties. One serves the need for somewhere to live; the other serves the desire to get away. Both eventually require someone to answer a question, maintain a property and make a promise hold up in person.
A second education after Stanford
Young earned his economics degree at Stanford in 1991 and his MBA there in 2003. Between those dates and around them sits a career that resists the tidy graduate-school brochure. Football came before his work in real estate and investment banking. The experience is a striking opening chapter, although his later appointments rest on years of operating businesses rather than sporting nostalgia.
His business experience included co-founding The Kaleidoscope Group, a consultancy focused on diversity and management. At Goldman Sachs, he worked in real estate principal investment and mergers and acquisitions. Those are different vantage points on an organization: how people work together, how an asset is valued and how a transaction changes the enterprise that survives it.
He subsequently served as executive vice president at Mesa Development, with work on residential mixed-use projects. The progression brought him from evaluating real estate to dealing with its development. A building can be elegantly described in a financial model. It still has to become a place that people can occupy. His next move would make that distinction a daily concern on a much wider map.
- 2003MBA at Stanford; the Mesa Development chapter begins
- 2012Joins Waypoint's single-family rental business
- 2017Becomes Invitation Homes COO following the merger
- 2025Takes the CEO role at Sun Communities
The merger becomes somebody's Monday
Young joined Waypoint in 2012. By 2015, he was chief operating officer of the business that became Starwood Waypoint Homes. When Starwood Waypoint and Invitation Homes completed their merger in November 2017, he became COO of the combined company. Fred Tuomi took the chief executive role; Dallas Tanner remained chief investment officer.
The announcement spoke the language of a large transaction: economies of scale, financing flexibility and expected annual cost savings of $45 million to $50 million. The operational assignment lay inside those abstractions. Two businesses had to function as one, while residents continued living in the houses. A merger does not grant everyone involved a convenient intermission.
That period helps explain the shape of Young's later career. He was an executive responsible for operations as institutional single-family rental businesses grew and combined. The work connected decisions made at headquarters to homes distributed across separate neighborhoods and markets. Scale could bring purchasing power and shared systems. It also multiplied the places where service had to work.
By 2024, Invitation Homes owned approximately 83,000 houses. Young was then president and chief operating officer, working alongside CEO Dallas Tanner. A photograph pairing the two executives captures an earlier chapter of the partnership. The more consequential picture was less photogenic: an organization expected to make a very large portfolio behave coherently, one address at a time.
A promotion measured in relationships
In March 2023, Invitation Homes added president to Young's COO title. Tanner's explanation put an unusually human emphasis on the appointment. He praised Young's understanding of the business, his ability to build teams and his attention to the experience of residents.
“a thoughtful and caring approach to our resident experience”
Dallas Tanner on Young's 2023 promotion
The description matters because it came attached to an expanded job, rather than a general tribute. Young had spent roughly a decade helping Invitation Homes and a predecessor build their operations. Tanner was describing the qualities the company wanted to give greater scope.
In March 2025, Tim Lobner became COO, while Young continued as president. The change gave Young more room to concentrate on long-term strategy and growth. His next appointment, announced that July, would take him from the Dallas-based rental company to the Detroit metropolitan area and a different form of residential real estate.
The Stanford relationship kept going
Alongside the executive career, Young maintained a substantial connection to Stanford. He joined its Board of Trustees in December 2018. By October 2026, the university's board roster still listed him, now identifying him with Sun Communities in Southfield. The institution had remained a constant while the business card changed.
In 2020, he was appointed chair of Stanford's newly established Black Community Council. Its remit included assessing university initiatives, communicating the needs of the Black community to leadership and recommending ways to involve alumni. Students, faculty, staff and alumni all had seats in the work.
Young welcomed the emphasis on accountability. “I appreciate the president's desire to hold leadership accountable,” he said. The council's task involved both listening and checking what followed. It was meant to evaluate whether initiatives achieved their intended effects, and to consider how oversight could continue.
That assignment sits naturally beside his earlier consulting work, while adding a different institutional setting. In 2021 he also joined Floor & Decor's board. These roles place his operating experience in rooms where he helps oversee organizations rather than run their daily business. They extend his career beyond any one employer without requiring a second origin story.
Forty years, then a handover
Sun announced Young's appointment on July 23, 2025, with an October 1 start date. Shiffman would move to non-executive chairman. Tonya Allen, co-chair of the board's succession planning committee, emphasized Young's experience across operations, strategy and leadership. The selection brought an outside executive into a company long associated with its departing CEO.
Timing is essential to understanding the handover. Sun had already completed the sale of Safe Harbor Marinas in April 2025. That reshaping preceded Young's arrival. He inherited a business whose boundaries were being reconsidered, along with colleagues who knew its communities and customers. The assignment included carrying forward decisions already made and choosing what should come next.
His first month included Elevate, Sun's leadership conference in Orlando, held during the company's fiftieth-anniversary year. Later came property visits, including a March trip to Sun Outdoors San Diego Bay. A new title can be announced in a paragraph. Learning the organization takes a longer itinerary.
October 1, 2025: Young becomes Sun's CEO and joins its board.
A smaller map, a demanding brief
During Young's first year, the geographic focus narrowed further. On September 22, 2026, Sun completed the sale of its UK assets, including Park Holidays, to an Aermont Capital affiliate. Net cash consideration was approximately $1.03 billion. The company said the proceeds were expected to support share repurchases, debt reduction and general corporate purposes.
The completed transaction left Sun focused on manufactured housing and RV communities in North America. For Young, this is a chapter about concentrating the business as well as running it. The two property types share a company, but they do not respond identically to demand. Someone choosing a long-term home and someone booking a vacation arrive with different calendars and expectations.
The second-quarter numbers made that difference visible. Same-property net operating income rose 8.8 percent in manufactured housing and fell 0.7 percent in RV communities, producing combined growth of 6 percent. Sun also recorded a $1.1 billion non-cash valuation allowance related to the UK business. Operational progress and the cost of reshaping a portfolio appeared in the same report.
NOI is net operating income. These figures describe comparable properties, rather than the change in the entire portfolio.
Back to the people on site
The cross-country visits offer a useful final image of Young's first year. He described spending time with resort teams as a highlight of his time at Sun. His thanks went to the people showing him around and sharing their observations. It is a modest scene beside a billion-dollar disposal, but it belongs to the same job.
His route to that job included a playing field, a consultancy, investment banking, development and the operations of a large rental business. Each transition changed the scale or setting of his responsibilities. At Sun, the practical questions remain close to the ground: what residents need, what guests return for, and whether the organization can deliver consistently.
Young now has a more concentrated portfolio to oversee and an established company to lead through its next period. The financial decisions will receive their quarterly verdict. Across the communities and resorts, a more frequent assessment continues whenever somebody arrives, asks for help or decides to stay.