The Clothier family business typically buys hundreds of houses each year, and now manages 5,600 of them in Memphis and six other cities for clients who invest as landlords.

But on Wednesday, Sept. 25, the Clothiers made a different kind of purchase. They closed on one of Germantown’s premier office buildings.

The plan is to make 1900 Exeter – also known as the Ezon Building – the new headquarters for their growing business, Memphis Invest. (The name will change to REI Nation next year; the acronym stands for Real Estate Investors.)

Kent Clothier, his wife Sherry and sons Chris and Brett paid $6.1 million to Israeli-based Faropoint Ventures for the 37,275-square-foot building. The brick, two-story structure was built in 1987.

“We had an opportunity to buy a building in Germantown,” Kent Clothier said. “We’re a fourth-generation family in Germantown. My dad started there in 1982. We live there and the opportunity came up. We’d been looking at that building for many years. Made an offer and negotiated.”

Memphis Invest will move from Cordova where it inhabits three of four small office buildings it owns near Agricenter International: 134, 130, 124 and 118 Timber Creek Drive.

The 1900 Exeter building has been 95% occupied with a handful of tenants. As their leases end, Memphis Invest will gradually move in and fill much of the building.

The company will move about 100 employees who work in eight departments: renovation, purchasing, sales, administrative, closing, information technology, property management and customer service.

Memphis Invest plans to spend several hundred thousand dollars renovating the property, especially the unusually large lobby with its atrium and skylight, other common areas and landscaping.

Construction contractor Chamberlain & McCreery, which renovates many of the houses Memphis Invest and its client-investors purchase, will make the improvements to 1900 Exeter, too.

“All this will be redone,” Chris Clothier said while pointing to overgrown bushes that block some sunlight from hitting ground-floor windows. “The trees are staying but all the bushes are coming out to create a green area. The canopy will be brought up so it’s healthier and you can see the building from the street.”

Every week, clients and prospective clients visit Memphis Invest headquarters. The clients will gain more confidence that the Clothiers will keep their rental houses well maintained if the company’s headquarters looks good, Chris Clothier said.

The Clothiers are basically telling clients, “I’m going to take care of your house the way I took care of my building,” he said.

Faropoint Ventures has gradually been selling off its retail and office holdings in the Memphis area while buying more and more industrial properties.

“We’ve been growing our industrial transaction business,” said Brian Califf, who represents Faropoint as executive vice president at NAI Saig Co.

“Their fund dictated a switch over from where they used to buy office and retail to strictly buying industrial,” Califf said.

Faropoint Ventures purchased 1900 Exeter about five years ago.

The building, in need of some updates, may be categorized as Class B, but the location is “Class A,” Califf said.

Germantown Municipal Park is directly across Exeter. Nearby are the U.S. Post Office, library, municipal center, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and many other stores and restaurants.

“For the Germantown core, there’s not many multi-story Germantown office buildings it competes with,” Califf said. 

Recent double-digit, year-over-year price increases are set to ease later this year and slow even more in 2014 in a more sustainable alignment with earnings.

In a more liberal forecast than other real estate outlooks, Capital Economics says the pace of year over year home price gains will slow from the current 10 to 12 percent to 8 percent this year, but get halved to 4 percent in 2014.

How so? By three measures.

Double-digit price gains out of the housing recovery gate were never sustainable. While housing remains under valued, housing bubble talk is premature, but the recent pace of price gains isn't sustainable. If prices continue rising at 12 percent, year-over-year, housing will be over valued relative to rents in the next few months and relative to incomes in early 2015. 

With the first presidential debate of the 2012 election set to kick off Wednesday, Americans may soon get a clearer picture of where President Barack Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney stand on housing and a better sense of the policies that they might implement.

The 11 million people whose mortgages are underwater and the 9 million who have received foreclosure notices since the housing crisis began are sure to pay close attention to the candidates' proposals. But sharp interest in their plans won't stop there: Other large swaths of voters, including homebuilders, Realtors and investors, are also holding their breath.

To get a sense of their concerns, AOL Real Estate spoke to six Americans from different backgrounds who have a whole lot riding on the next administration's approach to housing. Click through our gallery to learn about the changes that they are hoping for in the next presidential term. 

REI Nation, a single-family rental real estate investment services firm, sold 164 homes during the third quarter and spent $3.1 million with 58 local small businesses completing redevelopment of those properties. Those companies collectively employ approximately 250 workers.

The 164 homes represent a 166 percent increase from the third quarter of 2011 for the company, which was recently recognized on the Inc. 500/5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S. Of the 164 properties sold in Q3, 127 had fully complete renovations by the end of the period.

High cost items contributed heavily to the $3.1 million spent redeveloping properties, with 42 percent of the properties receiving new roofs, 54 percent receiving new water heaters, 57 percent receiving new air conditioning units, and 47 percent receiving new furnaces. In addition, smaller cost items such as replacing flooring, interior and exterior repair and painting, and lawn beautification were also factors in Q3’s redevelopment costs.

REI Nation reported working with 527 individual real estate investors from 41 states and six countries as of the end of September. The company is managing 1,476 single-family homes in Memphis and Dallas with a market value of approximately $134 million. Dallas is the company’s newest market, having been opened under the brand Dallas Invest this past spring.

The company expects fourth quarter results to show more than $13 million in private redevelopment funds spent in Memphis, and an additional $1.2 million spent in redevelopment in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex in 2012. 

'Conscientious People' Coming Out of a Crisis

Many of these single-family renters are like Jacobs' tenants, whom, he said, are "fairly conscientious people that just went through a foreclosure crisis" and want to retain some semblance of homeownership.

People like Michael Williams, who lives in Memphis, Tenn. When he couldn't find enough work, he was forced to sell his home in a short sale in 2011 for $110,000 -- nearly $40,000 less than he owed on his mortgage. Now he lives in a single-family rental, which costs him $1,025 a month. He said that he feels "blessed" to still be able to reside in a home of his own close to his old neighborhood.

"I'm partial to a home," he said. "I have my own privacy, and [I also] have grandkids."

Williams rents from REI Nation, an "REO-to-rental company" that purchases homes in Dallas, Memphis and Phoenix and flips them to "mom-and-pop" investors. REO is real estate parlance for bank-owned properties.

"They're looking for stability and still have pride of ownership," said Chris Clothier, a partner with REI Nation, of its tenants.