When renters move out of their affordable or workforce housing projects, leaders at Waterford Property Company don’t panic.
“The only tenants that leave our program are usually leaving to purchase their own home. That’s exciting for us,” Waterford co-founder Sean Rawson told the Business Journal.
Rawson and John Drachman started Waterford in 2019 to provide housing for middle-class workers who are paying upwards of 50% of their income on rent.
“Our goal is to lessen the burden on those households,” Rawson said. “It truly is teachers. It truly is first responders, both fire and safety. It’s civil servants. It’s also nonprofit employees.”
Last year, the Business Journal honored Drachman and Rawson with an Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award for their work in providing housing to a demographic of workers that can ill-afford paying market-rate rents in the cities that they work in. At the time, they had about 5,500 rental units.
A Pipeline of 2,500 Units
Since then, the partners, who grew up in Orange County, have been busy.
Today, the company’s portfolio includes over 6,500 units – a mix of market-rate, affordable and workforce housing properties, including 125 units of affordable housing currently under construction in Lake Forest and Irvine
Additionally, Waterford has over 2,500 units in various stages of development in California including 565 affordable housing units planned for Oceanside, Oxnard and Milpitas. The multi-family developer and investor recently invested in over 700 units in Dallas, of which about half are slated for workforce housing, Rawson said.
In Orange County, Waterford’s workforce housing apartments, the Cameo in Orange and three Platinum Triangle projects, are nearly fully leased, offering local firefighters, teachers, Disneyland Resort employees and hospital workers a place to live close to where they work.
Waterford works with a variety of government agencies to develop and manage workforce housing and affordable housing projects. These public-private partnerships allow Waterford to offer qualifying tenants below market-rate rents. For example, tenants at both the Cameo and Platinum Triangle projects save anywhere from $375 to $455 a month.
OC Natives Join Forces
Drachman and Rawson grew up in Irvine and Huntington Beach, respectively. Drachman majored in both entrepreneurship and marketing from the University of Arizona. He earned his MBA and MRED degrees in 2009 from the University of Southern California.
Rawson studied government, history and economics at Claremont McKenna College and earned his MBA from University of California, Irvine in 2010.
The two met over a decade ago at NAIOP’s Young Professionals Group and immediately bonded over their entrepreneurial aspirations.
In 2014, they shared an 850-square-foot Irvine office – Rawson running The Waterford Group and Drachman managing Stillwater Investment Group. A year later, they partnered on their first deal, a 14-unit Long Beach multi-family project, raising $1.2 million for renovations.
Growing Beyond California
Drachman said Waterford’s goal is to become one of the leading affordable workforce housing developers and investors in the United States.
As such, the company plans to grow its portfolio to 15,000 units in the next seven years in both California and Texas.
“Our plans are to continue to expand in California and Texas, while looking at other markets,” Drachman said. “We think this problem as it relates to the cost of housing is being felt by people all throughout the country now, and so we want to be on the leading edge of really continuing to figure out public, private partnerships and various structures to create more affordable housing.”
