Events | REDPartners

A note from the founder

Babar Khan, Founder & Managing Partner

My goal is not to take public money and turn it into more money for myself. My first priority is that the people in a locality get to feel what it is to work together and build the way the so-called big firms build.

There is a myth that Americans stand in line their entire life and only a few ever make it through. That trend has reached its expiration. We work together, and we make sure nobody is left behind.

Your tax dollar should not leave your locality. Contracts should reach the businesses run by the people who live there. Your legislature answers to you and your council sits in your own town — that is the entire point of them. Local business has to be supported by the people it serves, and then it repeats: we mind our area, others mind theirs.

We are not going to study your town, prove out a business model with what we learned, then turn around, sell it back to you, and tax you on top of it. No baseless idea gets born here.

And when I say we are up against something, I do not mean Red against Blue, Black against White, or Christian against Muslim. Keeping people busy with that is the oldest trick there is, and it always arrives in the name of security. We are chosen for our own society. We do not need an outsider signing a policy to be enforced on us.

History is not clean. We know that. We still love our society and the people around us, and we are going to take charge of our own business, our own buildings, and the dollars spent in our name.

Keep it simple and clean. Watch the base, take charge of your own matter, and come sit at the table. Bring what you can, and let me build this in your locality.

The invitation

Why I am asking you to come

Why I am not going to sell you my expertise, why entitlement is the part nobody teaches you at a conference, and what I actually want from a room in your locality.

What happens in the room

01

The numbers go on the table

Site cost, hard cost, soft cost, the capital stack, and what the return actually looks like. Not a teaser sheet — the same underwriting we work from.

02

Trades see the scope before it is bid

Contractors, subs, and suppliers from the locality look at the work while it can still be shaped, so the bid list is not decided three states away.

03

Land meets capital directly

If you hold a parcel, you are in the same room as the people who would fund it. No chain of intermediaries deciding what you hear.

04

Public questions get public answers

Nothing moves to a side room. If an answer is only good in private, it was never an answer.

05

Council and planning staff hear it when you do

Where local officials choose to attend, they receive the same presentation at the same time as the residents it affects. No advance version.

06

You leave with the next step written down

Who does what, by when, and what it costs. One page. Simple and clean.

Inside a session

The format does not change from market to market, or from a county hall to a full auditorium. Only the site, the numbers and the people in the chairs do.

Most evenings

The working session

A hall, a folding table, and the drawings out where anyone can reach them. This is the bulk of what we do and the format everything else is built from.

Babar Khan in a navy jacket, hands open over unrolled site plans at a folding table, taking questions from a standing group of residents and trades in a plain hall. — The founder takes the questions himself. There is no panel and no press officer standing between you and the person accountable for the project.

Babar Khan leaning over a site plan with one finger on a detail, talking with a contractor in a work vest and an older land owner in a straw hat. — Scope gets read by the people who would build it, while it can still be changed.

Babar Khan standing beside a presentation board showing a stacked bar diagram and a site massing sketch, addressing a seated audience on folding chairs. — The capital stack goes on the board. Every dollar in the project, and where each one comes from.

Hands resting and pointing across unrolled architectural drawings and a printed cost schedule, with a scale rule, a pencil and a hard hat on the table. — The drawings stay on the table the whole session. Anyone can put a hand on them and ask what a line costs.

When word gets around

A market turns out

Some rooms fill past the chairs we set out. Nothing about the format changes when that happens — the microphone just has to travel further.

Babar Khan in a charcoal suit on a low stage with a handheld microphone, arm extended toward a packed standing crowd of trades, ranchers and families in a large metal-framed hall. — Same numbers, same questions. More chairs.

Babar Khan crouched on one knee at the edge of a stage, sleeves rolled, holding a microphone out toward a woman in the front row who is asking a question. — A question from the floor gets answered on the floor. He comes down for it.

Wide view from the back of a full hall: Babar Khan alone on a stage beside a large screen showing a site plan and massing study, with hands raised throughout the audience. — Hands go up in a full house, and nothing gets taken offline to be handled quietly later.

Babar Khan in a charcoal suit and red tie shaking hands with an older man in a straw hat and work shirt in a busy arena concourse, with others waiting to speak to him. — The line afterwards is the part that matters. That is where the next parcel and the next crew come from.

When a pipeline is real

The market briefing

Once projects are financed and moving, the whole pipeline gets presented at the scale it will be built — to the people whose town it is going into and to the capital behind it, in the same room on the same evening.

Babar Khan in a navy suit on a large stage with a handheld microphone, standing before a floor-to-ceiling screen showing an aerial render of a mixed-use district at golden hour. — The whole pipeline, at the scale it will actually be built.

Close view of Babar Khan in a charcoal suit and deep red tie with a lapel microphone, mid-gesture, a softly blurred render of an illuminated mixed-use tower behind him. — Every project has a named person accountable for it. This is what that looks like from the third row.

Residents, council staff and capital hear the same version at the same time. There is no separate briefing.

Depictions of the session format.

Who is behind the table

REDPartners in fifty seconds

Land, capital and delivery — what we do, and why a principal leads every site rather than a representative.

Upcoming sessions

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Who should be in the room

There is no invitation list. If any of these describes you, the session is for you.

Land owners

You hold a parcel and want to know what it supports, what it is worth entitled, and whether you would rather sell it, lease it, or take a position in what gets built on it.

Contractors and trades

You run a crew in this market and want on the bid list for work that is funded, scoped, and actually going to break ground.

Investors from the locality

You would rather your capital sat in a building you can drive past than in a fund that will not tell you what it owns.

Small business owners

You need space, or you need the corridor around you to stop declining. Both are development questions and both get answered here.

Residents

You live here, it is your council, and it is your tax base. That is a sufficient reason to be in the room, and no one will ask you for a second one.

City and council staff

You are asked to evaluate proposals that arrive finished. Come see one while it is still being formed, and say what will not work.

What we will not do

Stated as refusals rather than promises. What a council awards or a market returns is not ours to guarantee — how this firm behaves is, and you can hold us to it.

No public money without the public math

If a project uses an incentive, an abatement, or a public dollar, the arithmetic behind that ask is presented in an open session before it is requested — not after it is granted.

No research extraction

We do not study a market, build a model out of what it taught us, sell that model back to the people who taught it, and charge again on top.

No imported crew for work the street can do

Trades, suppliers, and vendors are sourced in the locality first. Outside capacity comes in only when local capacity is genuinely absent, and we say so out loud when it does.

No wedge

We do not trade on Red against Blue, one color against another, or one faith against another. That fight is how attention gets taken off the balance sheet, and we will not run it.

No baseless idea

Everything presented at a session has a site, a cost, a source of capital, and a named person accountable for it. Without those four, it does not get shown.

Bring what you can

A parcel, a crew, capital, a room we can use, or nothing but your attention and your questions. All of it counts, and none of it is a prerequisite for showing up.

Tell us your market See the partnership tracks

Build It Where You Live