Maxime Leufroy, Ceo & Founder of Leufroy

Some of you read this before the official launch. If you did, skip ahead. If not, I’m pleased to share the first Whitebox memo.

Since 2015, Maxime Leufroy-Murat has built a presence across London real estate. He’s behind City Relay (£30m+ in rent returned), Opago (7,000+ homes under management), and Leufroy (30+ projects delivered or in pipeline). He also sits on the board of Bob W.

My conversation with Maxime offered something I hadn’t expected, not just a narrative of business growth, but a demonstration of how structured thinking, applied consistently, can evolve into a strategy of its own. Maxime didn’t begin with a thesis about real estate markets. Action came from identifying a problem, building a solution, and observing what that solution made possible.  

What started as a way to make ends meet, after a failed startup and two rejected applications to Harvard Business School, has since grown into three businesses:  

None were part of a master plan. Each emerged from solving one problem well, then staying close enough to see what came next. 

Maxime’s entry into real estate was shaped by constraint. After his startup ran out of money, he turned to Airbnb arbitrage, leasing flats and the renting them through Airbnb to make a margin. This was the foundation for City Relay. As operations grew more complex, he took a different path than most. Instead of outsourcing logistics, he built internal capability: housekeeping teams, linen delivery systems, check-in staff, and eventually a dedicated warehouse.  

As City Relay scaled, he noticed competitors asking to use his operations. That was the beginning of Opago, launched not from a whiteboard session, but from direct exposure to a recurring pain point. The company was not planned. It emerged from trying to fix something the previous business surfaced. 

This pattern: solve one problem thoroughly, observe the new friction it reveals, then solve that, is central to how Maxime operates. It’s not reactive. It’s iterative. And because each solution is built from lived experience, it often addresses issues others miss or misjudge. 

Most real estate firms start from a thesis: “multifamily is resilient” or “offices are mispriced.” Maxime starts from observed dysfunction. His edge is not forecasting, it is proximity to the work. 

Maxime is transparent about how much timing and luck matter. “You catch a bad wave, well, sit tight and wait, and hopefully the next wave’s going to be the right one.” That perspective gives him space to stay optimistic but continue to push forward. His approach is to focus relentlessly on what can be controlled: speed, processes, relationships, and discipline. 

That discipline shows up in how he communicates. He will follow up with a potential investor 50 or even 100 times. “Most people give up after three emails. I don’t stop until someone tells me to.”  

This belief in persistence extends to everything calendar responsiveness, deal flow, internal processes. “If you ask me for a meeting, I say let’s do it tomorrow. Most people give you a date in July. That’s nuts.”

He’s also unusually open about failure. Harvard rejected him twice. His startup ran out of money. “I really thought I would get in,” he said of the MBA. “But I didn’t. And that failure pushed me toward what I do now.” He sees setbacks not as derailments, but redirections. 

A major driver of his approach is the idea that your business mirrors you. “If there’s a problem, you need to look in the mirror,” he says. “Your business reflects who you are, so self-improvement matters.” That belief underpins everything from hiring to AI, if you want your company to adapt, you need to adapt first. 

Alignment is another core theme. A failed construction arm taught him this the hard way. “If you’ve got a business that makes money on the back of the keeping costs low, how can you be aligned?” Long-term success demands partners who are on the same team. Anything else creates future conflict. 

Maxime is not a traditional real estate professional, and he treats that as an advantage. “One core value we have is: always find a better way.” He questions everything, especially industry norms that others accept by default. “When you come as an outsider, it’s much easier to see the issues people have learned to tolerate.” 

Tendering is a prime example. “I hate the tendering process. Why do I need to ask how much they’ll charge me? I should already know what the price is. The margin should be clear. Just say: here’s the job, here’s the price. Take it or leave it.” 

This is more than frustration, it’s philosophy. Most inefficiencies in real estate exist not because they’re hard to fix, but because they’re baked into tradition. Maxime’s edge is refusing that logic. His instinct is to treat every standard process as a candidate for redesign. 

He applies the same mindset to AI. He looks to continuously iterate all of his businesses “as if we started them today”, with AI integrated from the ground up. That includes: 

He’s not romantic about the process. “We’re not doing enough yet. But we’re learning. We’re documenting. And we’re rebuilding with that thinking in mind.” He’s especially focused on documentation. “You need to know: what do people do every day? What should be automated? What stays human?” 

Maxime’s biggest current conviction is branded living in the private rental sector. Through a new brand called Séjour, he’s targeting the unbranded PRS market. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he says of the gap. “Every other real estate segment is branded, hotels, PBSA, BTR. PRS isn’t.” 

The idea is to develop a highly recognizable rental brand, and eventually license it to other operators once the reputation is established. He sees this as inevitable, “Tenants want predictable experience, just like hotel guests do”, and believes his operational foundation gives him the tools to actually deliver it. 

He’s also clear-eyed about what doesn’t work. “You don’t get such a premium for an extremely well finished product,” he says. In Central London, the city is the amenity. Overbuilding on finishes or gyms rarely pays back. His data, collected across hundreds of managed units, backs that up. Smart developers, he argues, will optimize for what tenants actually use, not what looks good in a brochure. 

Maxime concentrates on what is knowable and within reach. His approach is simple: stay close enough to the work to spot problems, question the practices others take for granted, and keep refining the system until that friction disappears. 

Several elements of his method stand out: a willingness to document every step so it can be improved or automated later; an insistence on incentive alignment, and persistence. These habits turn ordinary operational details, cleaning schedules, tender pricing, follow-up cadence, into sources of incremental edge. 

The lesson is not that such details guarantee success; cycles and luck will still play their part. Rather, it is that disciplined attention to them puts one in a better position when luck turns favourable. In an industry where many participants begin with sweeping theses and delegate the work, a systematic bias toward first-hand facts and small, constant improvements can compound into something that looks, in hindsight, like foresight. 

Viewed that way, Maxime’s three businesses are not separate ventures but successive proofs of the same idea: enduring results come less from predicting the future than from relentlessly fixing the problems that the present reveals.