Allan W. Arendsee – Chairman & CEO of Brandy Investments
Allan W. Arendsee is a real estate investor and the primary owner and manager of the Arendsee family holdings which owns several apartment communities in Dallas/Fort Worth and Nashville. He is the Chairman and CEO of Brandy Investments, the administrative vehicle for the extended Arendsee family’s investments. Additionally, he is the Chairman and largest shareholder of WAK Management, the property management firm that manages the 4,300 plus units the Arendsee family owns. Mr. Arendsee is the CEO and largest shareholder of KAWA Insurance Inc., a licensed Texas captive insurance company. In addition, the Arendsee’s have several other personal real estate investments.
Mr. Arendsee started working immediately upon graduation from the University of Redlands with a B.S. in Economics in 1984. He joined Four Winds, an international moving and forwarding company and started working in Long Beach, California. After two years, he and his wife Lyndsey transferred to Connecticut and worked in New York. The Arendsee’s returned to San Diego in 1987 where Allan began working as a commercial real estate broker at Walsh & Chacon. The firm, with Allan as a co-owner, became one of Downtown San Diego’s pre-eminent commercial real estate brokerages.
In 2000 Arendsee stepped out on his own to create A.W. Arendsee Real Estate, focusing on representing commercial property owners in Downtown San Diego. Seven years later, at the time of the sale of A.W. Arendsee Real Estate to BRE Commercial (that would later become Grubb & Ellis and eventually Cushman & Wakefield) A.W. Arendsee Real Estate, Inc. and its six brokers represented about 24% of all the office space in Downtown San Diego.
Starting in late 1997 (while still working as a real estate broker) Arendsee was a founding director of a community bank in north San Diego County. Southwest Community Bank was started with $5.4 million in initial capital and sold in 2006 for $175 million to Placer Sierra Bancshares in an all-stock transaction. Arendsee joined the board of NASDAQ traded Placer Sierra (PLSB) until its sale to Wells Fargo in early 2007. Arendsee received Wells Fargo stock in exchange for the Placer Sierra stock.
After the sale of A.W. Arendsee Real Estate, and the sales of Southwest Community Bank and Placer Sierra Bank, Arendsee was mainly monitoring his portfolio and dabbling in real estate investments in Texas. During that period, he received a master’s degree in executive leadership from the University of San Diego. He “unretired” and has been working with the family-owned apartments and running Brandy Investments and the other entities since April of 2007. He currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Burnham Moores Real Estate Committee at USD.
Since Allan joined the family business in 2007 the portfolio has grown from under 1,000 apartment homes to 4,354 as of May 2025. The overall net worth of the group has increased approximately ten-fold in that time frame.
In 2007 Allan & Lyndsey Arendsee created The Allan & Lyndsey Arendsee Family Foundation to direct charitable gifts, and since then have given away more than $1 million to other 501c3 organizations. In 2024 Allan and his brothers began serving as directors for the Arendsee Family Foundation, another 501c3, which holds nearly $10 million earmarked for charitable donations.
In 2008 Allan Arendsee became Chairman and largest shareholder of Seacoast Commerce Bank which grew to become one of the top ten Small Business Administration (SBA) 7A lenders in the country and had offices in some 20 cities around the nation. Seacoast Commerce Bank traded over the counter as SCBH until its sale to Enterprise Financial Services Corp. in November 2020. The bank grew from $67 million in assets to $1.32 billion in assets over his 12 years as Chairman.
In 2025 Allan Arendsee joined the Board of Trustees at his alma mater, the University of Redlands.
Mr. Arendsee and his wife, Lyndsey, have been married for more than 40 years. Together, they are the proud parents of two married adult children and the grandparents of four. Allan & Lyndsey have made their home in Coronado, California, since 1991.
