to a historic house on Main Street,
also owned by the Weaver family. “I was in
there 10 minutes or so… I walked out on
the front porch and gave Cindi a call and
she said, ‘What’s wrong with you, you don’t
sound right,’ and I said, ‘I think I just saw
our next house.’”
The family moved in in 2018.
Growing up in Milledgville Snyder says
he was a “skateboard and bike kid.” He also,
at age 13, snagged his first job with Allen
Macintosh, a noted renovation expert who
put the young Snyder to work scraping
mortar off old bricks and taking siding off
old structures, numbering each board and
putting it back on.
“He was kind of a purist renovation guy,”
Snyder says. “That made it difficult for him
to succeed financially. I got a good bit of
experience with a hands-on basis as a kid
doing that kind of work.” At 18-years-old,
he says, he knew where he wanted to go.
He wrote himself a note that he wanted to
“build equity in a real estate portfolio.” He
received a marketing degree from Georgia
College in his hometown was off to
Atlanta.
While attending college at Georgia State
University and working on a degree in
Real Estate and Urban Affairs, Snyder
also worked at night as a waiter at the
Ritz-Carlton. “I would work nights in the
restaurant to pay the bills and whatever I
could hustle up in the real estate business I
would re-invest.”
Snyder’s first project in Atlanta was the
purchase of a duplex that, with some work,
became a triplex. That was 1989 and “was a
funny transaction.”
“I stopped for a credit card advance on
the way to the closing. The seller took a
second mortgage. We financed it out at
a ridiculous interest rate.” But it worked.
Sweat equity, building value, learning what
creates sustainability began to worm its
way into Snyder’s psyche.
“In general,” he says, “we’re looking for
assets that 80 or 90 percent of the market
would walk away from. The ideal property
is in bad physical condition and needs help
there. It’s improperly positioned and may
need a change of use to be more economically
viable. Train wrecks are kind of our
story.”
David Nunn has been the city manager
of Madison for the past 20 years. He is
a native of Bostwick and has worked in
city government for more than 30 years,
including a stint in the Morgan County
Planning and Zoning Department when
the notion of zoning and building adaption
and restoration was in its infancy. He can
throw around names of movers who have
left their stamp on the Madison landscape
and does so with admiration. Madison has
been fortunate to have people willing to
invest in its infrastructure and therefore its
spirit.
“We’ve had people before that have affected
downtown in different ways,” he says. “I
don’t think we’ve ever seen anything near
the scale of what Preston is doing. He sees
opportunity in a different way.”
Along his way, Snyder became a managing
director of the real estate firm Braden
Fellman. In 2008, he started thinking
about getting out, of withdrawing value
and starting on his own in earnest. He had
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