Stephen Schmitz

Mr. Schmitz has held the positions of Chief Executive Officer and Chairman since our formation in May 2012. In October 2008, with our President and Chief Operating Officer, Laurie A. Hawkes, Mr. Schmitz co-founded ARP LLC, a private investment firm formed to capitalize on the extraordinary price deterioration in the single-family housing sector following the collapse in the housing and mortgage industries. The two founded Phoenix Fund, a fully committed private investment fund that owned 609 single-family homes as rental properties as of December 31, 2013, and ARM, the entity from which we acquired our real estate acquisition and management platform, in early 2010. In 2007, Mr. Schmitz was the Managing Partner of Grayhawk Capital Partners, a private real estate investment firm. In 2006, he served as Chief Executive Officer of AutoStar Realty, L.P., an automobile dealership financing firm. From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Schmitz was an Executive Vice President at GE Franchise Finance, which acquired Mr. Schmitz’s prior employer, FFCA, in 2001. Mr. Schmitz served as FFCA’s Chief Investment Officer for 15 years from 1986 to 2001, during which time it was a publicly traded REIT and one of the nation’s largest providers of mortgage and sale-leaseback financing to the chain restaurant, convenience store and retail auto parts industries. From 1982 to 1986, Mr. Schmitz was a commercial lender at Mellon Bank. A specialist in sale-leaseback acquisitions and mortgage financing on a programmatic scale, Mr. Schmitz has spent the majority of his finance career creating and managing teams of professionals that generate high volumes of small asset size real estate transactions, resulting in the production of transactions exceeding $2 billion in new investments on an annual basis. He attended the University of Wisconsin and received a BS from Franklin University and an MBA from Pennsylvania State University.