Matthew Whitaker

CEO at Evernest

Speaker

Matthew Whitaker is the founder and CEO of Evernest, one of the largest residential property management companies in the country. He started the business in 2008 during the financial crisis — stuck with 30 rental homes he couldn't sell, he turned the problem into a company. Originally launched as gkhouses and rebranded to Evernest in 2020, the firm has grown from those 30 doors in Birmingham into a national operation managing roughly 15,000 single-family and multifamily units across about 49 markets. A University of Alabama entrepreneurship graduate, Matthew spent the company's first seven years in the trenches before shifting his focus to scaling Evernest into new markets and building the team to run it.

Matthew's ambition for Evernest is simple and unapologetic: to build the best property management company on the planet. A student of Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, he's drawn to the unglamorous reality of building a company — the hard calls, the problems with no clean answers, and the discipline it takes to keep growing through them. Entrepreneurship runs in the family: his wife built and sold a business in the wedding space. When he's not working, you'll usually find Matthew traveling with his family.