I’ve gone pretty quiet on the Darwinian Doctor blog for most of 2025, although life behind the scenes has been anything but quiet.
Between locum tenens work, Cereus Real Estate, managing my personal real estate portfolio, and trying to be present as a husband and dad to two little boys, the past couple of years have also reshaped the way I think about physician financial independence and what a sustainable career actually looks like long term.
Tonight felt like a good time to pull back the curtain a bit and share what’s been happening behind the scenes and where things are headed next.
Building Cereus Real Estate
By far, the dominant force in my professional life over the past two years has been Cereus Real Estate.
For those newer here, Cereus is the real estate investment company and fund I launched in 2024 after the interest rate shock of 2022 reshaped the multifamily market. That period led to a broad repricing and, in many cases, outright devaluation across multifamily real estate.
As difficult as that environment was for many operators, it also created one of the most compelling buying opportunities I’ve seen in my investing lifetime.
Getting Cereus off the ground turned out to be far more labor-intensive than I initially imagined. There were the legal pieces: entity structure, securities compliance, subscription documents, fund administration. Then came the operational side: investor portals, CRM systems, banking relationships, reporting workflows and all the invisible infrastructure required to run an investment company professionally.
There were probably a hundred moving pieces that had to come together at once. Since formally launching the fund, we’ve now deployed roughly $7 million of investor capital into more than 1,200 multifamily units across the country.
That sentence still feels a little surreal to write.
What’s been equally interesting is watching the investor community continue to grow. More and more, I’ve noticed physicians, dentists, attorneys, business owners and other high-income professionals looking for something beyond the traditional “work harder, save harder” model. They want ownership, better leverage on their time and more flexibility in how they build wealth.
And honestly, I understand that deeply because it’s exactly what I wanted too.
I’ve intentionally tried to keep the Cereus team lean and nimble, but eventually the administrative workload reached a point where I realized I couldn’t keep running everything myself.
Over the past year, I brought on support for marketing and investor relations. Training new team members takes time upfront, but it’s already improving communication, creating better systems and making the business feel far more sustainable long term.
That matters because I’m building Cereus to last.
When I look at the current market data, I still believe the next several years may represent one of the best multifamily investment windows of our lifetimes. Distress continues to work its way through the system, debt maturities are forcing difficult decisions and disciplined buyers with liquidity are finding opportunities that simply didn’t exist a few years ago.
I can’t take credit for the timing, but I do feel incredibly grateful that Cereus launched in 2024 instead of earlier in the cycle, which would have exposed both me and my investors to the full force of the 2022 correction.
Why Locum Tenens Changed My Life
Medicine is still very much part of my life, but it’s no longer the entire structure of it.
These days, I practice urology roughly one week each month through locum tenens work. I made the shift to locums in 2022 after my family moved from Los Angeles to Memphis, and looking back now, it fundamentally changed the rhythm of my life.
Over time, locums ended up solving several problems at once for me.
It provides reliable active income, which still matters because I invest alongside investors in every deal we do. It also allows me to continue practicing medicine in a way that feels professionally fulfilling while protecting real blocks of time to build Cereus seriously instead of trying to squeeze it into evenings and weekends.
And I gotta be honest, continuing to work clinically keeps reminding me why so many physicians eventually start questioning whether the traditional path is sustainable long term.
As I enter my third year of locum work, I’ve gradually refined my ideal setup to better align with both my financial goals and lifestyle priorities. It’s not perfect. I mean, call is still call, but it’s a very intentional tradeoff, and one that gave me the runway to commit fully to capital allocation and business building without walking away from medicine entirely.
Currently, I’m practicing in Tennessee, not far from home in Memphis, which has made the arrangement substantially more sustainable for family life. And that part matters more to me than I probably would have admitted earlier in my career.
Family, Time and Physician Financial Independence
The biggest benefit of this transition hasn’t really been financial. It’s been time.
When I’m in the business-focused portion of my month, I’m available to my family in a way that simply wasn’t possible when I worked full time as a surgeon with Kaiser Permanente in Southern California.
Now I’m around for breakfast with my kids most mornings. I’m more involved in school activities. I’m physically present for the smaller moments that used to disappear inside a packed surgical schedule.
To be clear, my mornings are not some cinematic version of perfect parenting. My kids are normal kids and some mornings are chaotic. Shoes disappear, someone spills milk, someone else suddenly remembers a school project five minutes before leaving the house. But even the imperfect moments feel meaningful because I’m actually there for them.
That level of presence would have been extraordinarily difficult for me to achieve had I stayed on the traditional full-time physician path.
Over time I realized this was never only about real estate or passive income. Those things matter, of course, but underneath all of it was a desire for a little more control over how life actually felt day to day: more time with family, more flexibility and more space to be present for the people who make all the work meaningful in the first place. I think that realization becomes clearer with age.
Earlier in my career, I mostly associated success with forward progress: income growth, productivity, professional momentum, building bigger things. I still care deeply about all of those things, but I think I value intentionality much more now than constant expansion for its own sake.
There’s a difference between building a successful life and actually having enough space to experience it while it’s happening.
What’s Next for the Blog
For the first time in a while, I finally feel like I have enough breathing room to write consistently again.
Going forward, I’ll be sharing a mix of longer-form personal and business updates alongside shorter pieces adapted from content I’ve been posting on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
I’ve also become quietly obsessed with the rise of artificial intelligence and the way it’s reshaping business, investing and medicine. Expect more writing about AI as I continue exploring where this technology is headed, and how high-income professionals can position themselves intelligently alongside it rather than getting blindsided by it.
There’s a lot happening right now beneath the surface of the economy, technology and healthcare. And I suspect the next decade is going to look very different from the last one.
Following Along
If you’re interested in following along more closely with what we’re building at Cereus, you can join the Cereus Insider list. I share investment updates, market thoughts, deal analysis, and occasional behind-the-scenes reflections there as well.
You can learn more at Cereus Real Estate.
Well, that’s it. I gotta say, it feels good to finally have a little more room to think, build and write again.
Want to support the blog?
- Join our investor club at Cereus Real Estate
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- Contact me with questions
Experience the financial benefits of real estate without dealing with the headache!
