Built on Decades of Experience for Today’s Investors
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
In the early 2000s, when Andy Laing, president of Genstone Holdings, met Ed Fay, founder and CEO of the company, the two men had no idea that roughly 14 years later they would team up to successfully scale one of the most ambitious mortgage and real estate services companies in the industry.
Today, Laing said, Genstone Holdings is one of the largest and most comprehensive service providers in the space. “Genstone grew out of Fay Financial, a mortgage servicer with $48 billion in assets under management and roughly 190,000 customers,” he said. Laing continued, “My job is to help coordinate across all of those businesses because they are only successful if they collaborate and work together.”
Bryan Lysikowski, group president of property services for Genstone, described Genstone as an entire “real estate ecosystem.” He explained, “All of our vertically integrated companies support a real estate ecosystem, from originations and realty title insurance to field service, construction, and acquisitions. If an investor wants to take action in real estate, we are really the one-stop shop for that, but we are set up so a client does not have to do it all with us unless they want to.”
Lysikowski noted many of Genstone’s clients first encounter the company because they have a specific need. Once that need is met, the clients later opt to work within Genstone’s comprehensive services offerings in order to scale their businesses.
“Often, investors come to us because they are struggling with something specific,” Laing said. “For example, they cannot get financing. Once we help with that aspect, they think about other properties we can help with and other related services we can provide, such as realty, insurance, construction, and property management.”
Additionally, Genstone often helps clients evaluate their property insurance costs. At present, many investors are finding skyrocketing property insurance premiums a crippling issue for their portfolios, particularly if they are individual or “mom and pop” investors rather than institutional ones (see sidebar).
“We function not just as a provider but also a consultant in some cases,” Laing said. “Thanks to our extensive experience with institutional investors and extremely large portfolios, we can look at any portfolio with our access to all the companies we pull quotes from and identify where we can provide value. If there are properties where we cannot beat the existing price, we can facilitate investors finding other resources for those assets. We prioritize being upfront about what we can and cannot do and helping investors identify opportunities to avail themselves of the best options.”
Noel Christopher, Genstone’s managing director of strategy and growth, added, “We have the ability to give our clients a dashboard for their entire portfolio, not just the loans we service as a loan servicer. That way, we can take a holistic view of the homes they own along with the data and information behind those assets, like values, rents, and other aggregated data. When we talk about bringing in new clients or bringing new services to existing clients, we think of it more in terms of how we can be accretive to them as investors rather than trying to sell them on our services: a ‘give’ versus an ‘ask.’”
Real People in Real Estate
Despite its size and breadth of offerings, Genstone remains refreshingly focused on the role of what Laing calls “the humans in the conversations.” At a time when much of the industry has veered hard into services powered exclusively or nearly exclusively by artificial intelligence, Genstone has opted to incorporate AI into a dedicated human team of experts.
“We are the ones with the humans,” Laing said proudly. “We use technology and AI to supplement the humans, but we are the company with the real people with real estate expertise, knowledge, and proclivity to help our clients.” He continued, “We are very agile, and we designed Genstone from a customer-centric perspective, understanding what investors need and putting that all together in one place.”
In keeping with this customer-centric, human-oriented approach, the company recently has opened brick-and-mortar offices in metropolitan areas where its customer concentrations are highest. Those offices are currently located in Orlando, Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; Atlanta, Georgia; and Cincinnati, Ohio. Genstone expects to open additional offices in the Dallas and Chicago areas in the coming year.
Lysikowski explained Genstone’s dedication to bringing the advantages of an institutional service provider to individual investors is a driving force behind the company’s brick-and-mortar initiative. “We have the cadence of institutional service down, and now it is important to plug smaller players in the space into that same ecosystem and allow them to have the same success,” he said. “A big part of that is opening our brick-and-mortar locations with the whole ecosystem of real estate agents, construction team representatives, insurance agents, lenders, and title agents in one office. We are using tech to scale, but we are not losing the human element.”
Part of the “human element,” Laing said, is a wide knowledge base and expertise in the industry. “Property is the biggest investment most people make in their lives,” Laing explained. “This is their livelihood, and we treat it that way. We have worked with so many investors who have done all the research already, and they tell us, ‘I have already done the research, now I need to talk to the human.’ When those clients talk to Bryan Jenkins in property management, Rick Hoback in field services, Ron Marszalek in construction, Cory Jursik in realty, or Shawn Yerkes’s team on the financial services side that handles the lending, insurance and title through our affiliate TC&E, who are all among the best in the business, that is when these investors see how accessible Genstone makes expertise to our clients.”
For individual investors, one of the biggest challenges associated with growth and scaling a real estate business involves managing the myriad of elements involved in real estate investing on an individual asset basis. Genstone, Laing said, is determined to meet those investors where the need exists, and part of that process involves being able to meet clients in person and navigate a market with “boots on the ground.”
He explained, “If you want to talk to someone and have them walk with you through the entire real estate space with a breadth of knowledge and offerings, we have the people who can help you with all of that without you having to work with six or seven different companies, representatives, or vendors. We have made a decision to go all-in on people, and it is paying off for our customers and our company.”
In December 2025, Genstone was named to the Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies.
Cultivating the Ability to Help Create Exciting Wins
When Lysikowski describes Genstone’s services, he compares them to an extensive restaurant menu. It is important, he said, for real estate investors to resist being overwhelmed by the many choices at their fingertips when it comes to working with the company. Often, clients will initially come to Genstone seeking assistance in one or two areas in their portfolios, then expand the ways in which they work with the company after seeing the success of the initial projects.
“We had an investor who was acquiring preconstruction assets but had not accurately estimated the dollar amounts they would need for renovations,” Lysikowski recalled. The investor, who had a roughly $80,000 budget and about $120,000 in needed repairs, came to Genstone requesting guidance on wrapping up the project with the least loss possible.
“We were able to help them reallocate the funds they had and reprioritize that renovation so they were able to get that asset performing,” Lysikowski continued. “They were in a bad situation, and we were able to help them get that asset back on the market.” Lysikowski noted his team is encountering an increasing number of clients, both individual and institutional, who need help turning distressed assets into performing ones.
“It is fun to help people out of bad situations and to be part of creating exciting wins,” he said.
The company also works with investors on the lending side of real estate, Christopher noted. “We work with larger lien holders and investors by helping them deploy capital through lending and servicing the current loans they have acquired. We offer institutional-level real estate investment services to individual investors,” he explained. These “smaller-scale” investors are frequently working toward transitioning into full-time investing and larger-scale wealth building.
“We give them the tools to be efficient,” Christopher said. “Over the last several years, as interest rates have risen and the cost of owning [real estate] has gone up, it has exposed inefficiencies investors may not have originally noticed. A lot of people now own properties that might not have been the best buy, and we can help them.”
Christopher explained that Genstone’s comprehensive service offerings and associated expertise make it possible to help real estate investors not only optimize current assets’ performances but also determine whether the right move could be to liquidate and reinvest in another type of asset or real estate investing strategy.
“We can help them decide on the best strategy, whether it is disposing of the properties or reinvesting, and also help them acquire properties that make more sense,” he said, concluding, “We know that what works for one investor might not work for another, and we can help each client figure out what strategy will work the best for them.”
The concept of partnership plays a big role in Genstone’s operations and client interactions, and that can make the company’s many service offerings feel less overwhelming to new clients.
“It is really about understanding what clients need,” Laing said. “Some investors only need services related to single-family homes, while others may be interested in property management, construction or financing.” He noted many individual investors work with four or five different insurance companies and as many lenders as well spread over only about 50 homes.
“Owning real estate can be inefficient because of the time and resources it takes to manage all of the different service relationships like property management, insurance and lending,” Christopher explained. “We want to help our customers figure out their investment thesis, or their strategy and purpose, and then figure out how our products can help make that happen. In many situations, when we have done that, clients simply ask us to handle everything. We have clients who rely on us to buy just a few homes at a time while others have asked us to handle every element of acquiring and running their investments at any scale.”
“The really exciting thing for us is when we get to figure out what investors need, address that need, and then just start to build,” Laing said. He continued, “That is the epitome of our success stories, when someone has come in with just one property, then, all of a sudden they have two, three, or four, and then, pretty soon, they have a portfolio of 100. Developing that kind of partnership and becoming the back office for that investor so they no longer have to figure things out all alone is the value we provide, and we appreciate that opportunity.”
SIDEBAR 1
By the Numbers
$48 billion // Cumulative value of assets under management by Fay Financial, Genstone’s sister company.
$190,000 // Approximate number of customers working with Fay Financial. Many of these customers work with Genstone.
7 // Genstone can complete the onboarding process and start managing client properties in as few as seven days. The average length of time is between 7 and 15.
6 // There are six service verticals within Genstone’s property management offerings: marketing, resident screening, rent collection, maintenance, financials, and eviction protection.
5,000 // Genstone Holdings was named to the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America in December 2025
56 // Genstone is ranked 56th in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida metro area
166 // Genstone is ranked 166th in Inc’s “Financial Services” category
240 // Genstone is ranked 240th by Inc in the state of Florida
SIDEBAR 2
The Growing Issue with Insurance
In August of this year, National Mortgage Professional released some troubling new information on property insurance trends. According to data from Matic, average home insurance premiums had already risen by more than 9% in 2025, following a nearly 19% jump in 2024 and a nearly 12% jump in 2023. Previously, insurance rate hikes had been closer to 3-5%, NMP noted, and the increased market volatility had begun to create significant stumbling blocks for would-be homebuyers and investors interested in acquiring investment properties.
With rising deductibles hitting high-risk areas like Florida, Texas, and California particularly hard and many flat-rate deductible plans now specifically excluding a variety of relatively common weather-related damages, roughly three-quarters of lenders said at the start of Q3 2025 they were “very concerned” about home insurance and, by extension, the mortgage origination process. Around the same time, Bankrate warned home insurance was becoming “a growing financial burden for many Americans,” and the U.S. Census Bureau calculated U.S. households are spending an average of about 3% of their income just on property insurance, while residents of Florida (7.8%), Louisiana (10.8%), and Nebraska (8.6%) spend far larger chunks of their annual earnings on home insurance.
The growing burden of property insurance has an outsized impact on individual real estate investors, whose portfolios require highly customized insurance coverage, but who often do not own the thousands of doors necessary to begin benefitting from economies of scale in home protection. Additionally, individual investors often struggle to identify the best coverage for each property’s situation while also factoring in location and specific local trends in weather-related damage. For example, in Nebraska, homes are considered particularly at risk for tornado and hail damage, while Louisiana’s primary threats tend to be hurricanes. Understanding the minutia associated with each property’s geographic location and specific insurance needs is time-consuming and, for many investors, overwhelming, creating a scenario in which they opt to focus on other elements of the investment and simply “mass cover” the entire portfolio.
Genstone, said Noel Christopher, Genstone’s managing director of strategy and growth, has the breadth of expertise to help investors tailor every asset’s strategy and “investment thesis” individually to create optimal results. “We work to tie in everything: lending, title, insurance, property management, construction, repairs, maintenance, and real estate brokerage,” Christopher said. “We want to engage our client base so they can do more business.”
Genstone president Andy Laing added, “On the insurance side of things, we are dedicated to bringing clients years of experience and expertise to provide the best value possible on each property. We know it is hard to figure all of this out on your own, and we are here to work in partnership with investors and provide resources and value.”
Learn more about Genstone at Genstonepm.com.
