kept his small company alive since college and had purchased and
was managing several income producing properties on his own in
Midtown, including an apartment building on Ponce De Leon that
he had moved into and eventually purchased.
His timing could not have been worse. “About the time that began
to make sense the Great Recession hit,” he says. “Assets values
were going nuts and everything was worth 50 percent of what it
had been underwritten for. It was just a crazy, crazy overreaction
in terms of value. The baby got thrown out with the bath water in a
lot of cases. It was honestly just a bad time to leave. You needed to
stabilize the ship. Frankly, that took about 10 years.”
In 2018 Braden Fellman
purchased Snyder’s shares of
the company in full. They had
sold a massive development
and needed to reinvest. “My
partners had a tax problem.
They approached me and said
are you interested in selling
anything you’ve got, that they
could invest in a tax deferred
exchange and I thought about
it, but not for long, and said
how about everything.”
Now, he says, he had a tax
problem. His “cursed” eye fell
on Madison. “The question
was, can I get enough down
here to get critical mass to set
up an office. If not I would have
had to pay taxes on 25 years
worth of work in one year. If
you can find a way to reinvest
under the applicable codes you
can put it back to work and grow
a portfolio. I got the sense I would
be able to do that after tying up
a couple of apartment buildings.
That’s critical mass, let’s start
buying, let’s start investing and see
what we can find.”
On the ground floor of what for
years was a funeral home on East
Washington Street in downtown
Madison along an expansive wall
is a massive mural of two lucha libre wrestlers. In their masked
glory one is eating peppers. His tag team partner is sipping a
drink. Welcome to “Mad Tacos.”
Next door, Snyder says, a British Pub will be filled out. A ghost
kitchen is being built in the subsurface of the building that will
feed a white linen small dining concept and outdoor dining in the
Hancock Street side of the building. Snyder has also purchased
what was once Mint Juleps restaurant at the end of the building
and is considering building that out as a brewery.
Upstairs he is nearing completion of six residential loft apartments
averaging 800 square feet. Two units have a beautiful overview
of the Madison square. All should be completed by the end
of the year, he says. Snyder has spent long conversations with Ken
Kocher, Madison Preservation officer, to research the purchases
74 LAKE OCONEE LIVING | FALL 2021
and let that historical perspective guide him through restoration
and use.
“One of the things we’ve tried to do over the years is hopefully
catalyze some positive change in everything we’ve worked on. So if
you are taking stuff and turning it around and creating some value
in it, hopefully it catalyzes further change.”
Callahan said so far the level of restorative development from
Thomas Preston Real Estate has been “thoughtful.” Designs allow
for solutions on parking, utility lines and trash collection, the minutia
of development that, while not often seen, can make or break
the viability of a project.
“He has adapted from a metro perspective to a small town perspectiv,”
she says. As far as the Simmons building, a once thriving
funeral home that had, at one point, been a wagon building factory,
the recent adaptation is exciting for someone in city planning.
“It’s always nice to see the next generation use of a historic
building,” says Callahan. “He is choosing projects that are giving
buildings new life for the next 20 or 30 years.”
One of those is the New South Motel, a 15-unit motor court built
in the 1950s that is located next door to a liquor store and across
the street from a notorious, last chance motel. Snyder is proud of
the work his crew has accomplished at the New South, including
the renovation of its iconic roadway sign. The units will be rented
Airbnb style and the idea of contactless entry is “shaping up.”
“We’ll do a nice do-over inside with sort of mid-century inspired
furnishings. It will be done to a nice level of detail,” he says.
“We’re trying to present an alternative to either the more historic,
boutique offerings right in the downtown area or the Holiday Inn
Express out on the interstate. If you’ve got somebody who wants to
do something that’s a little more quirky and interesting and a little
bit edgier location, it presents that opportunity.”
There is no doubting the edge. Across from the New South, with
its glorious neon sign, is a convenience store that sells single beers.
Lottery stubs litter the parking lot. That’s fine with Snyder, a man
Callahan says is following “a different trend.”
“That’s what I do,” he says, recalling the day a dump truck
slammed into one of his early projects and burned it to the
ground. “That’s where I live, that’s where I go. There are folks that
like the edge. There are folks who like being in that kind of transition
and that have a unique style.”
Snyder spends his days renovating new projects while managing
nearly 300 rental units from Lake Oconee to Atlanta. To him and
the zenith he had reached in Atlanta, this is small scale real estate
with the caveat that “everything’s relative.” He is doing so, in part,
in that late model Ford and when he’s not talking to bankers or
planning officials he’s working.
“I like architecture,” he says. “I like design, I like fixing up old
buildings. I like tangibles. I like seeing things happen. I like carpentry,
I like being hands-on with some of this stuff.”
After he purchased the first duplex as a college student in the
1980s that begat a triplex that begat a profit, he had an epiphany of
sorts.
“I was really debating, asking myself, ‘Would I rather do this on
my own out of my pickup truck or would I rather go larger scale
and have more horsepower to do more interesting projects?’” he
says.
“That did happen and I made that choice and there are no regrets.”
Along an expansive
wall inside Mad
Taco is a mural
of two lucha libre
wrestlers, one
eating peppers and
the other sipping a
drink.