Andi Dirkschneider Bliss didn’t take a straight line to running Brookline Homes. Growing up in New Mexico, she was on job sites with her dad by age three, hauling nails in a pink tool belt while he framed houses. Her father worked for national builders including Pulte, KB, and Centex, which meant the family moved constantly: New Mexico to Colorado, Utah, Charlotte, Omaha, and back to Charlotte again. By 18, she was hosting model homes.
She enrolled at Emory University, earning degrees in neuroscience and behavioral biology and behavioral economics. The plan was neurosurgery. What pulled her sideways was neuroeconomics, the study of how brain function shapes the way people assign value to things. After graduating, she worked at a neuroscience-based marketing firm and then landed at a hedge fund specializing in distressed real estate, eventually managing a portfolio of a thousand REO properties. Her construction background made her useful there, and her instincts made her hard to fool.
Meanwhile, her father Scott was building Brookline Homes in Charlotte. Andi came on in 2016 at 26, already carrying a sharper read on buyers and markets than most people in the room. She worked every role in the company except bookkeeper, became president, and in 2025 served as president of the HBA of Greater Charlotte, the seventh-largest HBA in the country. She was the third woman to hold that position in the organization’s eighty-plus year history.
In this conversation, Andi and Michael get into what that background actually means for how Brookline operates day to day. The neuroeconomics thread runs through everything from how homes are designed to how buyers experience the process, and how the company fits into the neighborhoods it builds in. Brookline focuses on first-time and move-down buyers, building roughly a hundred homes a year in the Charlotte market, mostly around the 485 loop.
“Value is not just dollars and cents. It is how does it make you feel? How does it live for you? How do you feel as part of the community?”
Sense of place matters to Andi. One of her current communities sits adjacent to a historic 1890s farmhouse, and the townhomes took their design cues directly from it. Another was built around a historic mill. Her buyers and realtor partners notice.
“It is so important to us that we are benefiting a community and that we’re thinking about how we participate in that community, because we are locals and we’re not a national brand that is dropping into places where we don’t live.”
The conversation gets candid on culture. Andi walks through the “no assholes” rule and what it means in practice.
“If someone comes in and is being a jerk to any one of my team members, we are not selling a house to them. I do not care how much money they want to throw at us. Life is too short to deal with jerks.”
A team that genuinely reflects the people buying your homes is how Brookline catches its own assumptions before those assumptions end up in a floor plan. The company’s dogs come up too. What started as a website placeholder turned into a full brand identity, complete with job titles, life-size photos in the model homes, and a buyer base that skews more dog-friendly than you might expect.
Succession gets a significant stretch of the conversation. Andi covers how the handoff from her father happened gradually and organically, why she went back to school during COVID for her MBA and master’s in real estate, and what the original leveraged buyout plan looked like. Then she gets into what changed it: the death of her brother in April 2023, followed by her mother less than three months later.
“Our nuclear family of four became a family of two very fast.”
The succession structure had to be rebuilt. The company now sits in an irrevocable trust, and Andi talks through both the reasons that made sense and the complications that came with it.
Being a woman in the homebuilding industry is something Andi addresses directly. She talks about coming up in the Charlotte HBA at 26, the tokenism she suspected when she was first appointed to the board of directors, and how she handled trade partners who directed their questions to the men in the room instead of her.
“I still get people coming in the door who don’t want to talk to me. They want to talk to my production manager or my director of operations because they’re men and they assume that I just do design or just do sales. I have a GC license too. I’ve built houses too. I’ve been in the field too.”
Her read on how to handle it now is more measured than you might expect, and the framework she uses is worth the listen.
The episode wraps with a rapid-fire round covering everything from the fastest way to lose money in construction to what she actually took away from the Barbie movie.
About Andi Dirkschneider Bliss
Andi Dirkschneider Bliss is a second-generation homebuilder who quite literally grew up on job sites. As a kid, her family moved frequently as her father worked for several different national homebuilders, giving her an early front-row seat to how housing shapes communities and creates a sense of belonging.
She began working in the industry in high school, but her path wasn’t linear. Andi earned degrees in Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology and Behavioral Economics from Emory University, launching a career in digital marketing before moving into real estate investment and asset management. That mix of psychology, economics, and human behavior continues to influence how she leads and builds today.
In 2016, Andi joined her family’s company, Brookline Homes, where she’s worked across purchasing, sales, construction, and land acquisition and development. After completing her MBA and Master of Science in Real Estate (MSRE) at UNC Charlotte, she became President of Brookline Homes in 2022.
Today, Andi is passionate about creating attainable homes for first-time and move-down buyers, while also focusing on something equally important: growing people. Whether through leadership, mentorship, or community involvement, she believes strong communities are built when individuals are empowered to have fun and thrive.
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