John Griggs once wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. At seven, that was a perfectly reasonable career plan: interesting problems, excellent accessories, very little paperwork. His adult profession would supply rather more of the paperwork. He became a corporate lawyer, then a real estate investor. The detective survived the change of occupation. In his account of choosing a neighborhood, the investigation includes lunch, grocery shopping, a walk around the shops and a conversation with the people leasing the apartments.
Before there were neighborhoods to investigate, there were clients building businesses. Griggs practiced law in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, working with entrepreneurs, largely in technology. Watching them, he came to a conclusion about his own ambitions: he wanted to try building a business himself. In 2003, while still practicing, he began buying fourplexes in Arizona. A building with four homes is a fairly direct way to discover whether an enthusiasm for real estate survives contact with real estate.
The experiment became Presidium. After buying and selling in Arizona, Griggs saw an opening in Texas and bought the company’s first Dallas property in 2005. That year, he and business partner Cross Moceri left their legal careers and moved to Texas to make the enterprise their principal work. The order matters. He had already started investing before abandoning the profession. The leap had a running start.
- 1998Michigan law degree; a legal career begins.
- 2003Arizona apartments; Presidium takes shape.
- 2005First Dallas property; a move to Texas.
An education in things that can go wrong
His earlier training was substantial. Griggs graduated from Stanford in 1995 and earned his law degree at the University of Michigan in 1998. His legal employers included Milbank and Wilson Sonsini. Those names belong to the part of his life concerned with corporate transactions; the apartment business would add buildings, tenants and an operating company to the picture. A signed transaction could now be the beginning of a long list of responsibilities.
One less familiar chapter helps explain his attention to troubled assets. From 2012 through 2015, Griggs oversaw Presidium Asset Solutions, a special servicer he co-owned. Its work involved resolving and disposing of more than $1.8 billion in distressed debt. A workout is the business of dealing with an investment after its original plan has run into difficulty. There is little room in that assignment for assuming the first spreadsheet had all the answers.
Griggs is also a co-founder and principal of Deloache Capital, alongside Frank W. Busch III. That relationship broadens the picture beyond apartment development alone. Financing, ownership and operations recur across his working life. The legal career did not disappear so much as acquire additional moving parts. His present job demands attention to what happens both before an investment closes and after the congratulations are over.
A candy wrapper belongs in the financial discussion
Ask Griggs about an underperforming apartment community and the discussion can get surprisingly small. A broken window. A candy wrapper on the ground. In a September 2025 conversation about property management, he described these as signals that little things were being left undone. They matter because residents can see them without opening a financial report. A neglected detail is a message, whether management intended to send it or not.
His warning signs also include declining renewals and repeated negative feedback. He argues for leaders and on-site staff who are present and attentive to residents. It is an unglamorous account of the business, and a revealing one. Buying a property is an event. Maintaining confidence in the people running it requires repeated encounters. The wrapper has the peculiar advantage of being both very cheap to remove and very expensive to ignore as a habit.
This operational interest was visible years earlier. Discussing apartment technology in late 2019, Griggs pointed to remote temperature, access and lighting controls, along with easier communication between residents and management. He wanted amenities that worked together and remained easy to use. Even here, the appeal was practical: make daily living simpler. An impressive collection of features is of limited comfort if using them becomes another household chore.
“We’re not fixing the little things.”
John Griggs, describing the atmosphere neglect creates, 2025
Sherlock goes grocery shopping
Griggs’s approach to finding a location begins with familiar indicators: jobs, incomes, population and the forces that might sustain demand. Then he leaves the desktop. His neighborhood research calls for talking with leasing and sales agents and spending time where local people spend theirs. The childhood detective ambition appears in his own explanation of this process. It is a useful image for a job that can otherwise vanish behind acronyms.
The point of those visits is to discover whether the proposed project belongs in the place. A promising set of demographic figures cannot tell a developer everything about the people who might live there. Conversation can expose an assumption that needs changing. In his writing, Griggs describes ending the investigation able to picture the project in its setting, reject the fit, or adjust the proposal. Lunch, apparently, can be due diligence.
That method has a personal consequence too: it requires time. A visit cannot be delegated to a growth percentage. The combination of financial analysis and ordinary observation makes his detective analogy more than a decorative reference. He is describing the work of finding information that a standardized report might miss, then deciding whether that information changes the investment.
The lawyer returns to the rulebook
By October 2025, Griggs was directing that practical scrutiny toward city policy. He argued that North Texas municipalities could make housing easier to deliver by changing their own requirements. His proposals were concrete: allow more flexibility in parking design, pre-zone appropriate sites for apartments, shorten approval processes, and put housing near employment and transit. The former lawyer had found another set of documents with consequences for buildings.
He singled out structured parking. In his estimate, wrapping apartments around a parking garage could add $25,000 to $30,000 per home compared with surface parking. That was his development-cost argument, rather than a promise about any renter’s monthly bill. The broader concern was feasibility: a design requirement can help determine whether housing gets financed and built at all.
There is an obvious commercial interest in a developer asking for easier development. His argument is still specific enough to examine. Which requirements improve a place, which costs can a project support, and where should new homes go? Griggs brings the discussion back to those choices. For someone who left legal practice to buy apartments, a debate about rules turns out to be rather close to home.
Additional cost per home for a garage-wrapped design versus surface parking, in Griggs’s October 2025 estimate.
An uncomfortable market, a familiar assignment
His recent investments put that thinking to work. In 2025, Presidium returned to acquisitions after a hiatus, announcing three recently built apartment investments across Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Miami, totaling more than 850 units. Griggs described buying below replacement cost and looking for special situations that made a purchase possible. The distinction between a good building and a workable purchase price sits at the center of that account.
On March 23, 2026, Presidium announced its acquisition of Whitney at The Heights in Houston. The 186-home property was built in 2001. Planned work included common areas, the pool, exteriors and landscaping. Griggs emphasized targeted improvements to the resident experience. It was an assignment recognizable from his earlier career: acquire an existing community, identify what can improve, and take responsibility for the work.
In his July 2026 market commentary, he argued that a prolonged downturn was beginning to create opportunities for disciplined investors. He expected a thinner construction pipeline to mean fewer future deliveries, while acknowledging continued uncertainty. This was an investment thesis, with a forecast attached. It was also consistent with the caution in his operating advice: examine the conditions, know the price, and pay attention to what could go wrong.
A different sort of ground game
There is another landscape in Griggs’s life, some distance from a Texas apartment complex. In 2012, he, Moceri and Busch formed a friendship around wine and the idea of building their own wine country estate. Tres Colline Vineyards launched in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 2021. The venture gives the business partnerships a second setting, complete with rows of vines rather than rows of parking spaces.
The three are named as proprietors; the vineyard identifies Grant Coulter as its winemaker. That division of labor is worth preserving. Ownership does not automatically confer a talent for making wine, any more than buying a building completes its renovation. The appealing detail is the duration: a shared idea in 2012 became a launched enterprise nine years later. Some plans need rather more time than a closing dinner.
Still out looking
Griggs’s public conversations now range from neglected properties to investment cycles. In June 2025 he discussed his career on the Old Capital podcast. A June 2026 appearance on No Cap covered Presidium’s evolution and lessons from managing apartments through changing markets. Across those appearances, the early fourplexes remain a useful starting point. They keep the scale of the present business connected to something a person can actually picture.
His commitments also reach back to his universities. He serves on the boards of Stanford Professionals in Real Estate and Michigan’s Weiser Center for Real Estate. Stanford’s published November 2026 conference agenda lists him as moderator for a discussion on city development. It is a fitting subject for someone whose work now takes him from individual properties to the question of how places get built.
The most revealing image, though, may still be the neighborhood visit. A lawyer who wanted to own a business became an investor who tells other developers to go shopping and ask questions. The career has acquired financing structures, development teams and a vineyard. The useful clue may yet be waiting at the leasing desk. Griggs’s version of detective work has room for a spreadsheet, but it still requires leaving the office.