THE GURU OF GREENSBORO

Like the Oracle of Omaha, real estate developer Roy Carroll buys low and rarely sells. He’s biding his time now, waiting for the collapse.

When he was 14, Roy E. Carroll II bought an 800-squarefoot house in Danville, Virginia, using $1,000 in savings (equivalent to about $5,000 today) that he had cobbled together from odd jobs like mowing yards, returning bottles and selling candy. He fixed the place up and sold it a year later, using the profits to buy a Ford Mustang that he wasn’t even old enough to legally drive. That turned out to be the first of many properties Carroll bought on the cheap. In 1984, at age 22, the college dropout and his father, a laid-off grocery store supervisor, started building custom homes in Greensboro, North Carolina. Business boomed, and he bought out his dad in 1991 and started developing subdivisions. Within 10 years, Carroll switched to more-lucrative apartment complexes and…

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Forbes (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2023

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