Building Success One Deal at a Time with Daniel Angel Mejia

Daniel Angel Mejia grew up in Colombia, built a corporate finance career inside the Bogotá funds world, and moved to the US roughly ten years ago for a corporate role at a cement and ready-mix company. He started flipping houses on the side, applying what he had learned from the funds back home. Eventually he closed the chapter on corporate, took the leap, and founded Apex Development Group with another Colombian operator who had moved from Miami to Atlanta. Today Apex runs single family rehabs, single family ground-up for sale and for rent, and multifamily value-add — out of one office in Atlanta and one in Bogotá. The team is roughly 22 people across both locations. Vertically integrated end to end except property management. The Bogotá team (15 to 17 people) handles acquisitions, underwriting, structuring, capital markets, and remote project management. The Atlanta team (7 people) handles everything that needs boots on the ground. We talked about why Apex built a Colombian sister entity instead of going the VA route, why every property sits inside a two-hour drive from the office, why they built a debt fund instead of running another 506B, and the construction mistake Daniel still regrets. What landed in this conversation: Employees, not VAs. Most operators going offshore stop at virtual assistants. Daniel built a Colombian entity with actual employees who are part of the Apex team. Three reasons it works: same time zone all year (give or take an hour), shared culture and accountability through a real chain of command, and bilingual fluency that pays off on the construction side of a Georgia operation where a meaningful share of the labor and subs are Spanish-speaking. The bilingual edge alone is a competitive advantage Daniel calls one of Apex's "different shaders." The two-hour radius rule. Every Apex property sits inside the 13 metro Atlanta counties — nothing further than two hours from the office. Daniel's thesis is that during the 2012 to 2022 bull run, location knowledge didn't matter much because the rising tide raised everything. Today it matters intensely. Atlanta is a "pocket by pocket" market — some submarkets are for-sale plays, others are cash-flow rent plays, and treating them the same blows up the underwriting. Going out-of-state would mean re-learning that pocket structure in every new metro. Apex would rather go deep than wide. Why a fixed-return debt fund instead of a 506B. Daniel's lesson from years of LPGP raises: passive investors say they want 20% to 30% targets, but what they actually want is certainty, flexibility, and predictable cash flow. "Sometimes singles, sometimes doubles, sometimes you foul, and sometimes you grand-slam" — investors don't want a portfolio of swings, they want a yield. The Apex fund pays fixed tiered returns based on check size, compounds for investors who want growth, distributes monthly for investors who need cash, and has an 18-month lockup followed by periodic liquidity windows. That structure answers the "my kid is going to college in three years" problem that LPGP deals handle badly, because you can't force a deal to full-cycle on demand. Drag construction in-house earlier. Daniel's biggest professional regret is the time he spent trying to make outside GCs work for Apex before pulling construction under the Apex roof. Every healthy value-add machine he has met eventually does this — third-party construction breaks down once you actually care about cost-per-door and schedule discipline. His personal regret is the mirror image: he should have left the corporate job sooner and started Apex faster. Both regrets have the same shape. He sees the right move clearly now, and wishes he had moved faster then. "Never late, but could have been faster." Mentor advice that turned Daniel's career, from a former colleague in Colombia he later converted into a mentor: "Just try it, but make sure you burn your ships." Cortez burning his boats so his men couldn't retreat — the same principle, applied to a transcontinental career move. Daniel's working definition of success has shifted to match: "Every situation in life, whether it's good or bad, it's temporary. Just make sure you're enjoying what you're doing." He calls it "enjoy the ride." Book mentioned: Traction by Gino Wickman. Apex is running the EOS playbook and Daniel rereads the book every year — "so simple, but it just makes sense." Find it on Amazon. Get in touch: apexinvestments.us or LinkedIn (Daniel Angel Mejia). Real Estate Underground with Ed Mathews. 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