Steve Benson is Chief Operating Officer of Essential Housing, the land banking platform managed by TPG-AG. His thirty-year career in residential real estate began with a CPA foundation before moving into senior financial and operational leadership roles with private and publicly traded homebuilders — experience that gave him a ground-level understanding of how builders think about land, capital, and risk. 

That perspective deepened through leadership of land bank investment activities at GSO Capital/Blackstone and Acacia Capital. Five years ago, Steve helped launch Essential Housing; today it is the largest privately funded land bank in the United States — $20 billion originated across 600-plus projects in 26 states with the nation’s leading homebuilders. 

The largest public homebuilders needed a land banking partner capable of moving at their scale — and that partner didn’t exist. Building it required creating organizational infrastructure, systems, and technology from scratch to manage geographically dispersed teams executing at a volume the industry had never attempted. That work — helping to shape land banking from an investment platform to a real estate asset class — is where Steve’s background as a CPA, Certified Integral Coach, and Master’s-trained organizational developer quietly converges. 

He is based in Scottsdale, Arizona.