After 32 years building someone else's dream,
she learned to fund her own.
Stacey Thomas has been a real estate investor since 2006 — the long way, the quiet way, the part-time way. Then 2019 came. By 2021, the side door had become the only door.
Thirteen years of quiet investing.
In 2006, while still inside her corporate role, Stacey bought her first property — a triplex with tenants already in it. Not flashy. Not coached. Not a portfolio. Just one building that made the case, in writing, that the corporate paycheck wasn't the only paycheck.
She held that triplex through the thirteen years that followed. Quiet investor by night. Corporate by day. Learning by doing the whole way through. She was an investor before she was a full-time one — just not yet a savvy one.
Then the buyout.
2019. After thirty-two years inside a corporate role where her client was the entire federal government and she managed teams of 300+, the seat she'd held for three decades opened a door — a buyout package. She took it.
The transition wasn't overnight. It took two years. By 2021, the thing she'd been building on the side became the only thing. Within months the work changed from triplex-by-triplex into something deliberate: a practice with strategy, capital, and partners.
Real estate, with a purpose.
Today Stacey owns multifamily and residential portfolios with a heavy focus on assisted living for seniors and mental health housing. The work isn't transactional. Every acquisition answers a question: where does the capital go, and who does it serve when it lands.
The practice that began as a side door is now the room where private capital meets real deals.
Her personal progression as a capital partner.
The arc Stacey walked herself is the same one she now runs her practice on.
The work that began with a single triplex now sits as $25M+ placed across 35+ deals — equity in commercial and residential, increasingly institutional, increasingly intentional.
What she's building isn't a business.
Married, with two daughters, Stacey isn't building a brand. She is building a family office — the Wanzer Family Office — a multi-vehicle platform that turns one operator's discipline into a multi-generational practice.
The brunch table, the templates, the Sessions, the capital placements: every piece of her current work is a tributary into the same river. The corporate seat funded the first triplex. The triplex funded the practice. The practice is funding the family office.
Two doors into the room.
If the story sounds like yours — the operator with a deal in motion, or the partner who wants to be at the table where the work gets done.