Andy McQuade
Andy McQuade is a reformed building materials sales leader turned consultant, specializing in operational and procurement strategy for owners, operators and investors in the real estate space.
Prior to founding ARM Procurement Advisors LLC in 2019, he spent over two decades in both operational and sales leadership positions at some of the largest building materials supply companies in the US.
Andy started his career part-time during his Senior year of high school and remained part-time during college, was a salaried manager at 20 and a General Manager of his own store location at 22. He took an outside sales role at 24 and focused on learning his customer’s business so he could exceed expectations.
By 28 he had been headhunted by the largest building materials retailer in the world and took over as a district manager of commercial sales, where he remained for over a decade, growing his career from district to territory leadership before exiting to take over as Director of Sales for the US, Japan and Canada for a boutique reclaimed wood manufacturer.
Early in 2019, he took a call from a VP at a former customer – a large, privately-held, vertically integrated commercial multifamily owner/operator – who wanted to go out for coffee to “pick his brain” because of Andy’s focus and involvement with large multifamily operators across the country.
At the end of the three-and-a-half-hour conversation, this new VP of Procurement & Risk Management asked Andy why he wasn’t doing this type of consulting full-time instead of working for other people doing sales.
Around two-and-a-half-weeks later, the LLC formation documents were filed in Delaware and registered in New York. Less than 6 weeks after that, his career in the building materials industry ended and he started consulting full-time for the real estate industry.
Andy’s unique career path granted him unprecedented access to dozens of operations and hundreds of projects and properties across the US.
He was able to build relationships with both senior executives as well as operators in the field, learning how and why they did what they did.
This experience, and his first few years consulting for the industry, helped him develop the concepts and framework for The TCO Method ®, which serves as the title for his commercial real estate podcast and newsletter, as well as the working title for his upcoming book (which he is updating, editing and re-writing for the second time).
In his career, Andy has impacted hundreds of properties across the US, totaling over 175,000 units and over 50 million square feet of commercial space, working on projects as small as residential remodels all the way up to complete capex renovations of an apartment complex with over 2,300 doors across 313 buildings on a 256-acre campus.
Since 2019, he’s helped his clients add over $6.5 million dollars in annual, recurring Net Operating Income to their P&L’s through his focus on Total Cost of Ownership and his background in the building materials industry. This success has helped add over $100 million dollars in asset value to their portfolios while adding transparency and making them more efficient.
Andy has earned and maintains CAPS, CGA and CGP certifications from the National Association of Home Builders and holds a TRUE Zero Waste Advisor certification through the US Green Building Council.
He served on the board of directors for the local Home Builders Association from 2016-2024, and on the NAHB Multifamily Council and 55+ Housing Council from 2019-2023. He currently helps operate two chapters of National REIA in Rochester, New York and Knoxville, Tennessee where he handles back-end operations, strategy and compliance for the organizations.
Need some help, but not ready to hire a firm?
Andy does one-on-one consultations