CARPENTER AND ASSOCIATES - Key Persons
Jim began his real estate career while finishing high school, joining his father at Carpenter and Associates, Inc. He became the company pilot, established a research and marketing division, and conducted brokerage and syndication activities while graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976, with a BBA in Finance. He became President of the firm in 1978 and led the expansion of company brokerage and development activities. Today he is primarily engaged in development of two major projects east of Austin located along the Colorado River. Jim is a licensed Texas Real Estate Broker, member of the National, Texas and Austin Board of Realtors, member of the Real Estate Council of Austin, Austin Commercial Real Estate Society, Member of the Chancellor's Council for the University of Texas at Austin and former licensed pilot. Jim led the various companies, ventures and partnerships that have actively acquired, developed, owned and brokered billions of dollars of real estate investments statewide for over 40-years. The following information includes a few of the more prominent acquisitions, developments, or transactions and the demonstrates the diversity of experience possessed by the Carpenter enterprises.
Stephen graduated from Austin College in 2007, majoring in both Business Administration and Computer Sciences. His non-academic achievements include: President & Treasurer of the Sigma Tau Epsilon Fraternity, American Southwest Conference men's soccer freshman athlete of the year 2003, 2003 1st team American Southwest Conference Division honors, Top goal scorer (47) and most points (150+) in Austin College men's soccer history, Pete Cawthorn award winner for the top male senior athletic career; 2020 Austin College Hall of Fame inductee / honoree; Recognizing that the real estate brokerage, development, sales and financing industries have transitioned to online businesses, Stephen joined C&A in 2002 during high school, serving as the Company's IT and systems Manager. He developed and maintains all computer and data systems including company website www.carpenteraustin.com, and those for other company development projects. He personally handles all server maintenance and backup, networking, computer repair and maintenance, backup, and software/hardware upgrades. He also creates all marketing and sales packages, aerials, presentations, graphic designing and LoopNet webpages for all Company agents including management responsibility over all listings, contracts, company resources and data. He became President of the company in 2010 and leads all marketing, brokerage, property and personnel management activities. His accomplishments outside of real estate include multiple IT consulting and contract positions including HomeAway, Inc., www.homeaway.com & www.expedia.com. During his five-year time with HomeAway/Expedia he started out as the second member on the North American Tier II Tech Support Team. He was then internally hired to a Quality Assurance Engineer for the Global Traveler Team and quickly was promoted to a Software Engineer. He was promoted again to QA Lead and Software Engineer for the Traveler Home team. He was promoted again to Automation Engineer and put in charge of managing all of HomeAway's client facing QA testing automation for all 28 websites/brands globally. He single-handedly transitioned the automation suite from Ruby (deprecated) to Java so that all the front-end developers could aide with the upkeep of the ever growing test suite as none of them knew Ruby. Once he transitioned the whole framework to Java and stubbed out all the test paths for the UI developers he decided to transition back full-time to Carpenter & Associates, Inc. to work on our EASTVILLAGE & GREENPORT projects. This work has led to his fluency in Java, Ruby, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, Backbone, Git, GitHub, Rally, Jira, TeamCity, Salesforce, Kanban, Agile Development, Mac, PC's, almost all phone brands and almost all computer software. He also builds his own computers, is a former avid gamer and has a unique ability to solve almost any and all technical problems in this ever-changing world of technology. Stephen is a results-driven individual that attributes his success to ingenuity, hard work and determination which has led him to become an accomplished real estate broker, company executive, front-end/UI/automation/software/ruby/java developer, QA software engineer and IT professional. He is a jack of all trades with a passion for problem solving, outside of the box thinking, open mindedness and has developed a keen intuition to read others and situations. No task or problem is too big or challenging to solve.