SMALL TOWN, BIG VISION
New restaurants. Downtown lofts. A
throwback motel. A developer rooted
in preservation eyes the changing
landscape of Madison
Story and photography by
PATRICK YOST
He remembers the call. In the 1990s Preston Snyder, founder
and CEO of Thomas Preston Real Estate, was rehabilitating
two dilapidated houses near Atlanta’s Boulevard Place and
Ponce De Leon Avenue when his phone rang.
One of the houses was on fire. Snyder says two competing drug dealers
hot wired a dump truck left at the site, jammed a shovel on the gas
pedal and sent the truck careening in circles until it struck the house.
The wheels kept spinning until they burnt the tires off and started the
blaze.
The suspects were looking for, he says, a “diversion.”
“That’s the kind of stuff we would go in and work on.”
Taking a quantified risk, he says, has never been a problem.
In Morgan County alone, Snyder has invested north of $20 million
during a frantic real estate buying spree that began in 2018 and
included a six month period where his company purchased 35 real
estate properties in Morgan County and surrounding areas. He has