Andrew McKinley Owns His Buildings. He Also Builds Them.

Andrew McKinley occupies an unusual position in multifamily development: he is both the owner and the general contractor on every project he builds. In an industry that almost always keeps those roles separate, McKinley's West Edge Development does both — a structure he says wins him better construction financing, at the cost of a schedule that never really has a typical day. His current project, a 516-unit mixed-use community in Stanwood, Washington, exists in its current form partly because the state forced local governments to rezone for greater density. We talked about why that policy mattered, why he thinks municipal zoning is the biggest hidden cost in American housing, and where he actually sees AI changing the built environment — plus the metallurgy habit that followed him home from an elevator inspection.

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Tell us about yourself, West Edge Development, and your role.

I occupy a kind of interesting middle space in this industry: I build mixed-use multifamily, but I'm both the end owner and the general contractor. Typically those are two separate parties. Doing both means more work, but it gets me better financing for construction, since I control both sides of the equation.

West Edge started as a rental deal I did during college — I bought a house and rented it out to other students while I was still living in it. After school I went into single-family home building, but there's not much creativity in spec housing, so I moved into multifamily, both for the economics and because there's more room to design something interesting — especially with mixed-use, which is my specialty. Most apartment groups build residential-only. I like the version where you put retail on the ground floor and housing above it — it starts to feel like you're building a piece of a downtown rather than just a building.

On paper I'm the managing member — you could call me the CEO or the president. Most of my projects are structured as single-asset entities, so there ends up being a lot of them, and I'm the controlling owner across all of it. There's no typical day. I split my time between the construction site, where I have to sign off on anything that touches aesthetics or change orders, the bank, where I handle our draws directly, and the property managers who run our buildings day to day but still bring anything unusual back to me for approval.

The Zoning Problem

What trend in multifamily excites you most right now?

The pivot back toward mixed-use. It's not a trend most people pay attention to, because it's tangled up in municipal zoning law, and almost nobody outside the industry — or even inside it — pays close attention to that. For forty years, zoning in most of the country has favored single-family homes almost exclusively, and it's contributed a lot to the decline of small towns, because there was never enough density allowed near their downtowns to keep them alive.

That's finally shifting. There's a real push toward ADUs, lot subdivision, and higher density near town centers. Washington actually did something right here a few years ago: the state mandated that every municipality revise its zoning to allow a certain number and type of housing units by 2044, or lose state funding. They didn't go far enough — I think the decision-making power should have moved to the state entirely — but it was a real step. It's also the reason my project in Stanwood exists in its current form. Under the old rules I'd have had to set aside a chunk of the site for single-family homes and build significantly fewer apartments. The new mandate got me a variance that took the project from 460 entitled units to 516.

What's a challenge that people in your position tend to underestimate?

Regulation, and specifically how fragmented it is. Every municipality writes its own zoning code, which traces back to a deliberate push — going back to the Reagan era — to move control away from the federal and state governments and down to the local level. The result is that every time I start a project in a new city, I have to relearn its code from scratch, because none of them share a format, let alone content.

The estimate now is that twenty to thirty percent of building costs are due strictly to paperwork.

I won't give you the exact figure, but the permit fees alone on my Stanwood project came out to about a year and a half of that city's total operating budget. That's before construction even starts. Once you start pulling on that thread, it explains a lot of why housing is so expensive on both the rental and ownership side.

I want to be clear that I'm not against building codes or inspections — those are a genuine net benefit. I subcontract almost everything on my projects, so having a disinterested third party checking the framing, the electrical, the drywall against a real standard is valuable to me. What I'd change is the diversity of the codes themselves. Building codes — nail spacing, insulation values, that kind of thing — shouldn't vary block to block. Zoning is legitimately local: where industry goes versus housing is a decision a city should make. But there's no functional reason a construction detail needs forty different municipal answers instead of one state answer.

What's Next

What are you most excited to work on over the next year?

Finishing Stanwood. We're about a year and a half out, and we'll start leasing the first building within the month, so I'm right in the middle of pivoting from pure construction to also standing up the operations — getting residents in, making sure the property managers have what they need.

Past that, I'm most excited about townhomes. There's a townhome component at Stanwood that we actually converted from for-lease to for-sale, and I think that product is underbuilt relative to demand. Townhomes are the missing middle — they're genuinely entry-level in a way a single-family home with a yard mostly isn't anymore, given where costs and wages actually are. That wasn't always true: when the picture of a "starter home" first formed in the American imagination, attached housing was a much bigger share of the market than it is today. I want to design a large-scale townhome community that leans into that — the kind of walkable street where you'd have had a pub at the end of the row.

What advice would you give someone entering the industry today?

For someone coming out of school, I'd say a trade certificate is worth as much as a four-year degree, maybe more, for how an employer will actually look at it. I'll admit I'm less sure I'm qualified to give broader career advice for multifamily specifically — I'm still figuring a lot of that out myself.

Where AI Shows Up

Is AI making a real impact in what you do yet, or is it still mostly hype?

Not a huge one yet, but it's starting, mostly on the property management side. We use it to handle after-hours resident interactions — basic questions about office hours or amenities, and a first pass of triage on maintenance requests. If someone's freezer isn't running cold, it'll walk them through checking the door seal or the ice buildup before anything gets escalated to an actual emergency line.

I think the bigger impact is still ahead, on the construction side — not the physical labor, but everything upstream of it: architectural drawings, engineering, code review. Given everything I just said about how fragmented municipal codes are, that's exactly the kind of problem AI is well suited to. I've already seen tools that take a full set of code requirements for a jurisdiction — ADA clearances, fixture spacing, all of it — and generate a compliant floor plan from that input. There's another one that's essentially a generative site planner: you feed it a parcel and a unit count, and it lays out streets and townhome floor plans, and you can drag the streets around and it redoes the plans in real time. None of that touches labor costs directly, but it could meaningfully cut the front-end cost of a project, which is where a lot of the regulatory drag actually lives.

Rapid Fire

A book, podcast, or movie you've enjoyed recently?

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. Highly recommend — it holds up on the business side too.

The best career advice you've ever received?

To let things go. I'm particular by nature — I want things done exactly right — and that's not always compatible with construction, especially in multifamily, where the standard is different than it would be on a custom home. Once you start noticing every flaw, it's hard to stop, and most of what you notice, nobody else ever will. Learning where that line actually is took a while.

One piece of software you couldn't live without?

SharePoint. I live in an enormous volume of documents — without it I'd be buried in paper.

Something outside of work you enjoy?

I read a lot, and I'm slowly building out a forge in a shed at my new house — I want to get into blacksmithing. I picked up a bit of metallurgy as a Boy Scout and never followed through on it until now. Recently, I ended up with a stack of the massive steel counterweights elevator inspectors use to load-test a car before certifying it — they were going to throw them away, so I kept them for scrap. That's my raw material once the forge is actually running.