Building Her Own Real Estate Empire

By Kristine Hansen | Photo by Hillary Schave

In her early 20s, Julia Steege-Reimann found bliss renovating her first project — a duplex in Madison — with her husband, Kristopher Steege-Reimann.

“We turned one of our duplexes net zero [carbon emissions] and put solar panels on it,” says the Monona native, who grew up building homes with her family and was proud to put her own stamp on a project.

After a few more years updating properties, the couple expanded into hospitality. Today they own Voyageur Extended Stays, which offers seven furnished, extended-stay properties in Madison.

Making decisions based on intuition — not just number crunching — has always felt right to Steege-Reimann. This includes buying what’s now the 21-unit The Medallion — their newest property, which opened this past spring. It’s also how she decides who to work with.

“I intentionally hire women in non-traditional roles. My maintenance and facilities manager is a woman,” says Steege- Reimann, a former academic/career-planning coordinator with the Madison Metropolitan School District, who also taught in Madison and Chile. “[Women] are proactive communicators, have very good social intelligence and good project management skills. This really differentiates us in this male-dominated industry.”

Steege-Reimann handles operations and project management at Voyageur while her husband — who graduated from the construction and remodeling program at Madison College — works with the artists and designers the company contracts with.

Experiencing generosity abroad provided the best lesson in hospitality.

“My husband had a paragliding accident in Bolivia and we spent a few months living there,” she says. “All of the people in the town brought us food and prayed for us and helped us navigate the medical system.”

She wants to be just as hospitable to those visiting Madison, especially as around 25% of their guests are from another country. “We live between a two- and three-minute drive or a 10-minute walk of all of our properties. We can do it better than bigger companies because we care,” she says. “We’re giving [visitors] their first impression of our city.”

In fact, being a stranger in a foreign land introduced her to Dutch designer Arno Hoogland. On a long weekend in Amsterdam with her husband, they stayed in a hotel room Hoogland had designed. They connected with the designer and eventually hired him to design The Medallion’s custom headboards, carpets, lights, sofas, chairs and wood ornamentation.

“It was this cool, cross-cultural experience. He really liked Frank Lloyd Wright and we do too. The Medallion has nods to Wright. Everything has to be cohesive, from the inside to the outside, says Steege-Reimann.

Voyageur Extended Stays’ latest venture further lifts up artists and designers. “We realized we love working with artists and designers,” says Steege-Reimann. “We’re going full-blown craft and homemade.” This includes producing
a line of artist-made rugs as well as taking on general contracting jobs, often employing designers to create custom work for the final designs.

What’s next? “We are starting to look for our next development project,” says Steege-Reimann. “It’s going to be really unique, handcrafted and has a focus on community, like everything we’ve done so far.”

What has been your biggest career challenge?

“It’s psychologically been hard to leverage everything that we own, knowing we could lose it all if it doesn’t work out. It’s been a big sacrifice, but it also feels right for us.”


Read more from our September/October 2024 cover story “Success Stories” here.

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