Like the Oracle of Omaha, Roy Carroll has made a fortune buying low and rarely selling. His sweet spot: cheap land that he’s turned into lucrative apartment complexes across the Southeast. Now Greensboro’s richest resident is biding his time, waiting for the coming real estate market collapse.

“Warren Buffett looks for great companies and doesn’t trade a lot. That’s our philosophy in real estate,” he says. “Let’s find a good location and keep it. Why sell the golden goose?”

It’s a strategy Carroll’s actually been testing out since he was a kid. When he was 14, he bought an 800-square- foot house in Danville, Virginia, using $1,000 in savings (equivalent to about $5,000 today) that he had cobbled together from odd jobs like mowing yards, returning bottles and selling candy. He fixed the place up and sold it a year later, using the profits to buy a Ford Mustang that he wasn’t even old enough to legally drive.

Nearly five decades later, Carroll has built a $2.9 billion fortune largely made up of real estate, including more than 13,000 apartments and 29 self-storage facilities, as well as industrial land and mixed-use projects. He has also parlayed that Mustang he bought as a teenager into a collection of yachts and Ferraris, including one that raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans last summer.

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