Jimmy Jung

BuildBlock runs on a simple, almost stubborn idea: that a person sitting in an apartment in Seoul should be able to buy, build, and manage property in the United States as easily as someone walking into a brokerage in Los Angeles. Jimmy Jung founded the company in 2018 and still runs it as CEO. The product is not a listings site. It is a pipeline - property search through MLS, financing, the setup of a U.S. legal entity, acquisition, construction, ongoing management, and tax reporting - stitched into one continuous service so the investor never has to find a stranger to trust on the other side of the Pacific.

That is the part most people miss about cross-border real estate. The barrier was never the money. It was the missing middleman: the credible local who could read the contract, pull the permit, hire the contractor, and file the taxes. Jung's bet was that you could replace that fragile chain of intermediaries with a single company that owns the whole process. BuildBlock is headquartered in Seoul and operates across Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, New York, Texas, and Hawaii.

Lately the company has been pouring bigger foundations. What began with condominiums and single-family homes has expanded into industrial and plant development - factories for semiconductor and battery makers - and, more recently, AI data centers, solar plants, and power infrastructure. BuildBlock now describes itself as a U.S. General Contractor, which is a long way from a tidy real estate app. It is the natural endpoint for a founder who is, first and last, a builder.

Before BuildBlock, Jung was on the ground at one of the most photographed construction sites in the world. He worked as a project manager on Google's Charleston East headquarters in Silicon Valley - the tent-roofed building that turned a tech campus into an architectural event. That is a useful detail to hold onto: he did not study real estate from a desk. He managed the steel and the schedule.

His training is unusually deep for a startup CEO. He studied at Yonsei University, earned a civil engineering degree at UC Berkeley, and completed a master's in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. The combination matters. Civil engineering tells you how the thing stands up; management science tells you how the project gets paid for and finished on time. He holds the highest level of professional engineering licenses in both civil and mechanical engineering - a double credential that is genuinely rare, and a quiet signal of how seriously he takes the technical side of a business everyone else treats as a marketplace.

Put the pieces together and the company stops looking like a pivot and starts looking like a thesis. A man who managed a Google building, holds two PE licenses, and trained at three elite schools did not stumble into construction-grade real estate. He walked straight at it.