Frequently Asked Questions

Building With Intention is an interview series about the thinking behind the buildings. Hosted by Matt Dean, each episode features a candid conversation with developers, operators, and commercial real estate professionals about development, entrepreneurship, and what it takes to build places that make a city better — not just projects that pencil.

Building With Intention is hosted by Matt Dean, co-founder & CEO of Dean&Co., a branding and marketing agency dedicated to the commercial real estate industry. He started the series to move the conversations he was already having in commercial real estate — the honest ones about cost, compromise, and long-term consequence — onto the record.

In commercial real estate, saying a project "pencils" means the numbers work — the projected income, costs, and financing add up to a viable deal on paper. It's shorthand for financial feasibility. Building With Intention takes its position from the idea that penciling is the minimum bar, not the goal: a project can pencil and still make a block worse.

Building With Intention is made for commercial real estate developers, operators, investors, brokers, architects, and city officials — anyone involved in deciding what gets built and how. It's also useful for people early in their real estate careers who want to understand how development decisions actually get made, beyond what shows up in a press release.

Building With Intention covers commercial real estate development, mixed-use projects, adaptive reuse, retail centers, city districts, real estate entrepreneurship, and community-focused development. Episodes get into deal structure, financing, entitlement, project setbacks, and the tradeoffs between financial returns and community impact.

New episodes of Building With Intention are released monthly. You can watch full episodes on YouTube or listen on Spotify.

Building With Intention is available to watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify.. Every episode is also posted at buildingwithintentionpodcast.com, with clips on Instagram and YouTube Shorts.

To be considered as a guest on Building With Intention, reach out through the contact page or email marketing@deancostudio.com. The show looks for developers and operators with a specific project worth unpacking, finished or still in progress, who are willing to be candid about how it actually went, including the parts that didn't work.

Building With Intention features developers and operators from cities across the country. The common thread isn't geography — it's that every guest is building in a place they're personally invested in.

Building With Intention is hosted by Matt Dean of Dean&Co., an agency specializing in branding and marketing for commercial real estate and hospitality. The podcast is an independent editorial project. Guests are chosen for the work they're doing, not their relationship to the firm.

Yes. Building With Intention is open to sponsorship and partnership inquiries. Reach out at marketing@deancostudio.com with what you have in mind.