Transforming Land, Building Community: A Q&A with Chris Montes, Founder and CEO of OLOS Impact

I’m Chris Montes, founder and CEO of Olos Impact. My background is in real estate, finance, and entrepreneurship, and I’ve spent much of my career thinking about how capital can be used to create both financial and community impact.

Olos Impact was created around a simple observation: there is an enormous amount of vacant and underutilized land owned by faith-based organizations, while communities across the country are facing a growing shortage of attainable housing.

We partner with churches and other faith-based organizations to help them unlock the value of their real estate and transform underutilized land into housing and community-oriented developments. The faith organization is a partner and owner in every development. Our goal is to create projects that are financially sustainable, serve the surrounding community, and allow faith-based organizations to extend their mission into the marketplace.

Ultimately, OLOS exists at the intersection of faith, housing, and positive community impact.

Build around a problem you genuinely care about, not simply an opportunity you see in the market.

Markets change. Capital is becoming more expensive. Business models evolve. Technology changes quickly. But if you are deeply committed to solving a real problem, those changes become challenges to navigate rather than reasons to quit.

For me, the housing crisis is deeply connected to a larger question: how do we use the resources already sitting in our communities more effectively? There are tremendous land, capital, and institutional infrastructure opportunities that aren’t being fully utilized.

I would also tell founders to be willing to think long-term; the best companies are built by staying relentlessly focused on a solving a meaningful problem.

I see several major shifts happening simultaneously in real estate.

First, the housing shortage is forcing the industry to rethink what we mean by affordability. It’s not enough to build housing that is technically affordable if there isn’t enough of it available. We need to think about “attainable housing” — housing that is both financially accessible and actually available to the people who need it.

Second, we’re seeing a growing recognition that some of the most important real estate opportunities aren’t necessarily sitting in traditional development pipelines. They are sitting on land already owned by institutions — churches, nonprofits, universities, and other community organizations. Unlocking that land could become a meaningful part of addressing the housing shortage.

Third, technology and AI are beginning to change how real estate gets developed. Historically, development has been highly fragmented and incredibly dependent on manual analysis, relationships, and institutional knowledge. AI can help developers evaluate sites, analyze markets, identify opportunities, and streamline parts of the development process that have traditionally been slow and expensive.

One of the biggest mistakes is looking at real estate purely as a financial transaction.

Real estate is ultimately about people, communities, and long-term relationships. A project can look attractive on a spreadsheet and still fail if it doesn’t understand the community, the local political environment, the surrounding neighborhood, or the goals of the landowner.

Another common mistake is starting with the solution instead of starting with the problem. In development, it’s easy to say, “We should build X number of units,” before asking what the community actually needs, what the land can support, what the surrounding infrastructure looks like, and what the landowner is trying to accomplish.

I also think people underestimate the importance of alignment. In a partnership between a developer and a church, for example, there are financial objectives, ministry objectives, community objectives, and development realities. If those aren’t aligned at the beginning, problems tend to surface later.

The best developments begin with alignment and work backward from there.

Become a student of the entire ecosystem, not just your particular role within it.

If you want to build authority in real estate and impact development, understand development, capital markets, zoning, housing policy, construction, community engagement, and the economics of the people you’re ultimately trying to serve.

Then spend time with the people actually experiencing the problem. Read the reports but also talk to developers. Talk to investors. Talk to policymakers. Talk to community leaders. Talk to nonprofit organizations. And, in our case, talk to pastors and church leaders who are making decisions about their land and their communities.

Authority doesn’t come from simply having an opinion. It comes from developing a nuanced understanding of a problem and consistently contributing useful insight to the people trying to solve it.