Company News · October 2026

The Journey that Led MoveZen, and Founder RE Hunter, to the News & Observer’s Raleigh’s Best List

MoveZen was incredibly proud to hear that the News & Observer had named it the silver property management winner in its 2026 Raleigh’s Best awards, a program decided by public vote. It has always prided itself on being a company that not only delivers exceptional results, but also provides industry-leading customer service, and this literal vote of confidence from the local Raleigh area community is the reason it strives for excellence.

“Raleigh was the first big test of everything we believed about running a scalable business,” said founder and CEO RE Hunter. “These voters played more of a role in shaping our company than any other, and this award has been our goal from the start. It means a lot.”

The Person Behind the Early Days of the Company

The company’s operating style, mainly its relentless approach to consistency and improvement, starts with its founder. RE Hunter was raised in Wilmington, NC, in a working-class household with parents who were self-employed for much of his early days. That of course offered many great business management insights that would carry him into the later years. Because Hunter began the business at 24, just before the famous 2008 housing crisis, and had a pronounced introvert streak, many of the traditional business paths of networking and being trusted with major opportunity were simply not available to someone from a humble background. Another factor shaping those early decisions and born from old as well as new circumstances was a need for certainty of success. Experiencing the struggle of both his parents’ launch of small new businesses created an unusual mix of boldness and aversion to risk. Many see the bold strokes he’s taken over the years, such as nearly doubling the size of the business just out of his 20s with an M&A-style acquisition of a local competitor, as evidence of a risk-taking maverick, but what really defined his success early on was making sure that every major risk taken had an almost guaranteed payoff if he applied his full effort to whatever would be needed.

What he became was a pure operator with systematic tenacity and technical expertise. He didn’t talk his way into business. He spent most of his time behind a keyboard, fighting tough battles for Google ranking against companies with 15+ year histories and resources. This method also positioned MoveZen as a classic “mom and pop” rental manager so that even now as a dynamic housing services provider of all types, the majority of its rental customers only have a single home on its program.

Hunter’s tenacity first clearly surfaced as a high school wrestler. That journey began in 9th grade. Out of shape and inexperienced, he set a goal to one day be a 4A state champ that his coaches and teammates literally laughed at. A well-known anecdote from that time was the approach he took to snow days off from school: of the five or so in his career, he spent most of those days at school rolling out the mats himself, wrestling four or five hours while teammates took shifts meeting him, because no one person could match his focus.

Leading into his junior year he seemed poised to place second in the state, but broke his nose badly in the tournament quarterfinals and went on to lose in the semifinals to an opponent he’d easily retired two weeks earlier, and who went on to place second. Hunter spent that summer ferociously training, as he told his coach, on the idea that not even a broken leg would keep him from the title the next year.

It wasn’t that test, but a test did come. First, we need to go back in time 4 years and take note that Hunter had spent his entire wrestling career refusing to give up a single pin in formal competition. One of the clearest examples of a never-give-up attitude that drives him and the company today. Then, days before Christmas in his senior season, he lost a famous tournament final to an opponent on a quick pin call after a common acrobatic move. His first pin ever, and he had to watch the victor walk out with a 48-man bracket (the real prize for a tournament win). The opponent was intimidating in every sense of the word, and had an epic season in addition to quickly pinning his top competitor. Just a few weeks later he drew the same opponent in the state semifinals, a match literally no one believed he would win, not his mom, coach, or a single teammate. He entered that tournament without a shred of doubt, and left as a dominant 4A state champion and a UNC Chapel Hill recruit.  The match played a pivotal role in determining the top 4 team places. For that reason, and a 71-2 record, coaches voted RE as the #3 senior in the state.

The technical expertise and overall discipline took longer to arrive. At UNC, Hunter planned to study computer science and got his first taste of coding programming Lego Mindstorms robots in an entry-level course. While school and wrestling went great, due to various factors that are hard to pinpoint, he returned home after one year without a lot of direction. He knew he loved technology though, and pursued common certifications that led him to land a unique role as a Dell Computers contractor swapping out computers on Camp Lejeune. At the tender age of 20, Hunter found himself backing up and restoring files to new computers for Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonels. An unforgettable opportunity for someone who had not experienced much of the world to that point. Focusing on his skill set rather than pay, Hunter taught himself to build websites and laid further groundwork to start an IT and technology company.

Those skills quickly landed him a contract gig rebuilding the website for a vacation rental company in Carolina Beach. That contract immediately evolved into a salaried role maintaining the website, the network, and a sizeable Google AdWords account at a time when AdWords was a groundbreaking concept. All of these skills were learned researching basic concepts for no pay late into the night. Almost immediately after his role expanded, he decided that he wanted to take on building a better cleaning schedule and did so without asking, a bit of a theme. This consisted of turning over nearly 100 units across 8 miles of island, many of them five-bedroom oceanfront houses with pools, all between 10am and 3pm on Saturdays and Sundays. That’s a logistics feat for a seasoned operator, let alone a twenty-one-year-old. Those technical and logistical skills have carried him ever since, and continue to shape the company as well. He went on to oversee the cleaning team, a brutal management environment, along with all marketing, all IT and digital, and a heavy share of maintenance and facilities work besides.

An Education in Life

Carolina Beach gave him another set of lifelong insights: a front-row seat to the most extreme housing mania in the country. From 2005 to 2009 the small island was hit as hard as the famous markets of Florida and California. He watched the insanity on the way up, the denial on the way down, and the acceptance and turnaround that followed. It left him a debt-and-risk-averse believer in sound finance, and it cost him as the Federal Reserve proceeded to penalize conservative financial management for the next 15 years with policies that rewarded blind risk-takers and punished conservative operators. Through much of the cheap-money era that followed, he invested in himself and his business while the stock market returned 30% in some years, and he worked 70-hour weeks for about $3 an hour. He has some regrets about that, and he’ll say so. What saved him from true regret is the skillset those years produced, a rare one in today’s resource-scarce environment, and an environment he now feels uniquely qualified for after 15 years of bootstrapping a scaling low-margin business across 2 states.

Built in the Crash

MoveZen began as Victory Real Estate Sales in 2006, founded in Wilmington with $10,000 in capital and a founder in his mid-twenties who most preferred to be parked behind a keyboard crunching data. When the bubble he’d watched up close began to wobble, Victory did the unpopular thing. Some of it was the naivety of a mid-twenties founder, but the stance was firm: easy-money Fed policy had fostered obvious unsustainability. In article after article through 2007 and 2008 the company warned owners to lock in wealth that had doubled and tripled, and to sell into a slowing market at minor discounts. He also discouraged buyers for many years, which of course is a questionable strategy for a real estate sales agent. Because he approached real estate with an investor’s mindset, not a salesman’s, his sales career was lackluster to say the least. Seeing what lay ahead, and missing the practical and technical expertise he had exercised in his vacation rental job, in 2008 Hunter made the decision to drop sales representation entirely and focus solely on property management.

The timing was brutal. The restructured company had literally a single customer when the Great Recession struck a historic blow to housing. What followed became the foundation for all it is today. Victory spent the crash years in the trenches helping owners convert homes with no chance of selling into strong long-term investments, and shepherded hundreds of those accidental landlords through to the 2013 to 2015 period, when most finally sold with significant appreciation. Cash flow statements from that era typically showed well over $100,000 in income on less than a 2% maintenance-to-income ratio, a vacancy rate under 5%, and internal rates of return likely pushing 15% even on homes bought near the peak. That stretch of incredible performance honed the methods that led MoveZen to today’s award, and generated a large number of extremely grateful homeowner clients.

The Raleigh location began in April 2011, as a one-man operation up Interstate 40 and run by a founder who still didn’t feel he had earned the title CEO. It quickly grew into the company’s flagship office, due in large part to two crucial relationships that continue to play a large role in the award-winning company today: Cat Worlds, easily one of the best rental managers in the business, and Doug Farkas, the company’s primary repairman, who’s beloved by thousands around Raleigh. Several of today’s leaders arrived not long after, including Alisha Robbins, now the company’s COO, who started as a weekend intern.

In 2014, barely out of his 20s and already stretched thin, Hunter led a MoveZen acquisition of a local competitor, Southern Retreats Property Management, that nearly doubled the company’s staff, property count, problem load, and opportunity overnight. He calls it one of his fondest professional experiences, and he expected it to be the first of dozens. It was the last for a long time. Private equity soon began massive campaigns to roll up huge numbers of smaller property management companies, and a smaller local company could no longer compete at all. MoveZen turned instead to pure organic growth built on its customers’ success: a new five-star location every 14 months on average through 2023, roughly doubling in size one office and customer at a time until recently.

Many years later, a struggling entrepreneur reminiscing about paths untraveled, Hunter bought one of those old Lego Mindstorms robots used on eBay, determined to learn coding that could deliver the logistical expertise and consistent excellence he felt the company lacked. While it traveled through the mail, he picked up a phenomenal book titled Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, and promptly entered a flow state so intense that he emerged a couple of weeks later with a proprietary company SQL database combined with an app that automated 30% of his daily workload while delivering more consistent and better results. The Lego machine had barely arrived and was never touched. It sits on his shelf today as a monument to a monumental growth experience.

Three Ideas From 2022

In the midst of another insane era, the COVID years circa 2021-2022, Hunter clearly saw the seismic changes coming for housing, especially rentals, and in 2023 published those lessons in a 50+ page annual update built on three ideas that now underpin everything MoveZen does.

In 2024 the company put those ideas ahead of growth itself, announcing a deliberate shift from volume to quality, with a focus on its local offices. From 2024-2025 the company parted ways with nearly a quarter of its owners to defend that standard. The bet is paying off as the company thrives despite another bout of historic headwinds in housing services. MoveZen is also proud that these insights have allowed it to boast about perhaps its greatest achievement, evicting fewer than 1% of its residents over its entire history, including the much tougher last six years. Also tougher is keeping maintenance costs under control these days. Prior to 2020 MoveZen had proven that it could consistently keep repair and maintenance costs under 5% for portfolio owners, and even now those costs average around just 10%. The company is thriving in today’s turbulent housing market, and it’s done so by focusing on being a respected brand known for solving old problems in unique ways.

The Tools Are the Difference

The private equity industry, meanwhile, has spent years trying to scale single-family rental management and has mostly failed in MoveZen’s view because it fundamentally misunderstands rental customers. Hunter’s company believes it’s positioned to succeed where those efforts stalled, because the people who understand the customer are the same people building the tools, and they are industry leaders specifically at always finding win-wins in tough situations.

Blooming from the idea of “let me check out that old Lego Mindstorms again,” MoveZen now has an industry-leading proprietary application that runs more than 50% of the company’s processes. MoveZen operates an internal API that seamlessly connects its operation to most other software providers, and it’s building a public API to publish historic rental data, nearly twenty years of it, for data scientists and journalists. When an institutional owner or account needs something a standard program can’t handle, the company builds the answer in-house rather than translating its business for a coder who literally speaks a different language, or making the many necessary trade-offs to cobble different providers together for a leading solution. In an era when its most heavily resourced competitors were securing their next cheap loan and offloading the customer experience to bots, MoveZen was building something different.

The company has run a similar playbook in the age of AI. The MoveZen team automated more than half the work it was doing five years ago without cutting a single job, because automation was always central to its success as a scaling business perpetually reinvesting in excellence. Its senior leaders have adopted AI aggressively, but it’s used as a tool for achieving customer and company results, to be used by the people running the company rather than something forced on the team or customers. Most of that work starts with a straightforward goal: help staff and customers see a complicated market the way the company sees it, then build the charts, calculators, case studies, and datasets that get them there. The approach matters most when times are uncertain, and unfortunately we’ve all had a steady dose of that for some time. In part due to its technical expertise, but mostly due to its effectiveness with customers, MoveZen earned a place on the 2024 Inc. 5000 on the strength of its 2021-2023 performance, among the toughest years a housing small business has faced in modern history. Rather than clinging to poorly understood technical breakthroughs, the achievement was earned through old-fashioned automation, high-tech investment, and a leadership team running what Hunter believes is an operation that would compete with most Fortune 500 companies.

What’s Next

The Raleigh’s Best award is the latest in a run of regional and local recognition: a Bronze finish in the Charlotte Observer’s 2025 Charlotte’s Best awards, a Platinum win in CommunityVotes Winston-Salem 2026, and consecutive Consumer Choice Awards for Raleigh property management in 2025 and 2026. For a company that spent years pursuing national recognition, its focus on local performance is the real engine of its success.

What comes next follows the same pattern: keep building industry-leading tools, keep the team in front of customers, and keep entering markets the way Raleigh was entered, with standards that don’t bend. The next test of its approach will come in North Texas, where Hunter plans to relocate in the summer of 2027 and hopefully recreate the same customer satisfaction there that led MoveZen to earn today’s award. As for today’s award: MoveZen is grateful to every Raleigh resident who took time out of their day to vote, and it plans to spend the next fifteen years in that city the way it spent the first fifteen, showing up, answering the phone, and solving tough problems for homeowners, portfolio investors, and renters.