Meet the developer and TikTok star betting millions on 2 KC landmarks. Can he succeed?

With his glinting eyes and a boyish smile, 37-year-old Johnny Youssef of Kansas City — whose affable nature and house flipping skills have garnered him more than 130,000 TikTok followers and 100,000 more on Instagram — tends not to look nervous, even when he is.

These days, gulp, he is.

“I was with my bank today, saying, ‘Can I borrow another half million?’ Youssef said, smiling not unlike a first-time skydiver: What’s about to unfold will either be the thrill of a lifetime, or not. “They said, ‘OK, which of your properties do you want to put on the chopping block?’ If I need money, they need collateral. …

“I mean, I’ve learned to be calm. I’ve had challenges before. This is definitely the scariest. I have days when I’m like, ‘I should be more scared than this.’”

Youssef spoke recently standing in the sanctuary of what is his biggest risk yet.

Known on TikTok for rehabbing houses for sale or rental, Youssef in April 2022 paid $700,000 for his first commercial property. It’s prominent — the 100-year-old former Broadway Baptist Church north of Westport at 39th Terrace and Broadway Boulevard. The limestone building sat dark and empty for close to a decade.

Youssef’s original idea: Spend $700,000 more to turn it into a destination wedding venue and event space.

Construction began in August 2022. Fifteen months later, nearly every inch of the once dark-wood worship space — from the nave and the sanctuary, to the pews and wall paneling — has been painted a glistening white.

Overhead, its domed roof is white, too, crisscrosssed by golden vaulted ribs. To the east, morning sun shines through a 20-foot-tall stained glass window once obscured by a wall. Still under construction is the basement being turned into a reception room, while rooms to the west are becoming a groom’s suite, a bride’s suite and four hotel rooms for wedding guests.

“I was really interested in doing something with a purpose,” Youssef said. The beauty of the church, the opportunity to elevate the block beyond nearby vape shops, he said, spoke to him. “That’s what drives me. It’s not the money.”

But money drives projects.

Married only two months before construction began, Johnny and Abby Youssef, 28, now not only have a 4-month-old daughter, Laney, they have a $1.4 million project that has spiked to $2 million and could get close to $3 million.

“Basically, double what I thought,” said Youssef, who concedes to being “nervous.” Also not helping: repeated thefts of tools, building materials, copper wiring.

Flipping Rockhill

To help pay the freight, Youssef has taken on a flipping project that, while less massive, is also being watched closely: It’s the 6,300-square-foot “Rockhill Clubhouse,” a circa 1902 home built by William Rockhill Nelson, the late founder of The Kansas City Star.

The white clapboard home with six stone fireplaces is arguably among the most visible in the affluent Rockhill neighborhood. Located at 610 Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd., it possesses a prominent glassed-in sun porch spanning its second floor and it sits across from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s rolling lawn.

Bought for $400,000 in a bank sale, the house is also a mess.

Sunken at least six inches to one side, the 120-plus-year-old structure had to be jacked up. Inside, every room has been gutted. Knob-and-tube wiring has been ripped out. Cracked plaster and lathe walls have been removed. With another $400,000, Youssef hopes to turn it into a modern showplace with new kitchen, new heating, new plumbing, new electric, six bedrooms and four-and-a-half baths while preserving what can be preserved, like its wide and gently curved center-hall staircase.

“We’re keeping all the woods,” Youssef said. “The railings, the hardwood floors.”

He hopes to sell it for $1 million to $1.3 million and use the money to subsidize the church build.

Julee Sanders, who grew up in the Rockhill home and whose parents owned it from 1977 to 2022, is disappointed in how Youssef is transforming the home’s interior, which she claims was not in as much disrepair as he portrays. She also worries about it becoming an Airbnb or short-term rental like other Youssef properties.

“When William Rockhill Nelson built those homes, they were fashioned after the cottages back east, with the lower ceilings, the smaller rooms,” Sanders said. “He wants to knock the walls out and have like an open-air, California-style.

“The way the home was built, historically, it is not being preserved.”

But Gerry Carlson, president of the Rockhill Homes Association, said that neighbors are supportive of the project overall, with one caveat.

“If it’s going to remain a single-family home, we’re all for it,” Carlson said.

Paul Smith, 86, who lives on the Country Club Plaza, was the senior pastor at Broadway Baptist for 49 years, from 1963 to when he retired in 2012. He presided over some 900 weddings, he estimated. He’s toured the church as it’s being renovated and said, “It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful.”

He called Youssef “a creative genius.”

“It was just lovely to meet Johnny, who was a fellow Christian and a neat guy,” Smith said. “When I saw his plans, and then when I visited to see what he’d done, it was a beautiful transformation.” When Smith was the minister there, he said, the church had no center aisles for brides and bridal parties to walk down. They had to walk on the far sides of the pews.

Youssef split them down the middle.

“It’s wonderful,” Smith said. “Would it that every church building would be blessed by Johnny.”

Land of opportunity

Faith, in fact, originally brought Egyptian-born Youssef to Kansas City. In January 2009, he came for a leadership internship with the International House of Prayer.

“It’s instrumental,” Youssef said of his faith. “I’ve had a few nuggets in my life where I have really felt God’s hand.”

Youssef said he has long been enamored with storytelling. Post-college, he worked briefly for an NBC news affiliate and thought of becoming a television journalist. Telling stories, he said, is the prime reason he is on TikTok and Instagram.

His own narrative — the fact that he now lives and works in Kansas City, raising a family, trying to transform a church — is surprising even to him.

Born in Cairo, Youssef said he was 15 when his parents, feeling stymied by a struggling Egyptian economy, moved to be with family in Richmond, Virginia, bringing Johnny and his younger brother, Harvey.

Whereas in Egypt, his college-educated parents, Samir and Mary, had lived a life of relative privilege, in the U.S. their degrees were of little help. His father had been an entrepreneur, manufacturing clothes for outlets like J.C. Penney and Target. His mom managed the employees. In the U.S. his dad instead began by stocking shelves at a Walmart. His mother, a seamstress, worked for a tailor at a Men’s Wearhouse.

“They’re workaholics,” Youssef said. “I mean it’s the immigrant’s story.”

Except their American story began when they arrived in June 2001. Three months later, airliners hijacked by terrorists would upend the world, flying into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center and the U.S. Pentagon.

Youssef had just begun high school as a junior, with Harvey as a freshman. With his darker skin and accent, Youssef feared being bullied. But it didn’t happen.

“Overall,” he said, “people were very supportive. I think it really made me appreciate America as the country of opportunity.”

The opportunity turned to real estate while Youssef was a student at Virginia Commonwealth University where on-campus college housing, he recalled, cost what he considered a small fortune.

But not far from campus, a blighted neighborhood was being torn down. Richmond was putting up affordable housing. The year was 2006 — before the housing bust and 2008 recession, when banks, bundling mortgages to sell as securities, were approving loans for almost anyone for little or no down payment.

“I thought, ‘Wow,’” Youssef recalled, “’what if I move into one of those and have my roommates paying the mortgage?’”

He spoke to his father. Together, that’s exactly what they did, renting to students. The houses weren’t fancy, “two stories on a slab,” Youssef said. No basements. But it worked so well, they bought five more within a year, with Youssef managing properties as he went to class.

“That’s how I got into real estate,” said Youssef who, with a fresh real estate license in hand, graduated in May 2008.

When the market crashed, students were still paying, so the family kept the properties. With jobs in TV news scarce by 2009, Youssef came to Kansas City for his church retreat. In deciding to stay, he looked at real estate, finding houses for sale in south Kansas City for as little as $18,000.

“My friends were like, ‘Johnny, if you buy this, we’ll rent it for $800 a month,” Youssef said. “That was a no-brainer.”

In time, Youssef would amass more than 20 rentals while he bought, fixed and flipped others ranging from townhouses to a 100-year-old Warwick Boulevard bungalow that he turned into a modern short-term rental. A beleaguered 5,300-square-foot home in north Hyde Park, a former nursing facility, is a nine-bedroom home with rooms in contemporary whites and grays.

Youssef’s name is attached to at least eight limited liability corporations, according to court filings and the office of the Missouri Secretary of State. They include Adonai Homes, Melrose Rentals, Richmond Rentals, Smarvey Rentals, DwellKC Properties, Woodcrest Properties, Evergreen Rentals. The Broadway Baptist Church is under the the company Melrose Abbey LLC, a play on both the church and his wife’s first name.

Love online

From Fayetteville, Arkansas, Abby Marrin, a former Miss Arkansas Teen USA contestant, had moved to California. Youssef had a friend, a model, who created funny TikTok videos. Marrin had been following him. When Youssef came to visit in 2020, during COVID, he asked his friend if anyone had caught his eye.

“He said, ‘Well, there’s this cute girl,’” Youssef recalled. “He said, ‘She seems really nice, but she likes Disney a little too much. I’m kind of weirded out by that. She also likes sharing Bible verses, which is cool, but like, it’s weird.’

“So I made a joke. I was like, ‘So she’s going to be a great, fun mom. She’s a woman of faith and has some values. … If you tell me she looks like Margot Robbie she’s going to be my wife.’ He’s like, ‘She does look a little like Margot Robbie.’”

Youssef messaged Marrin over Instagram. She thought he was cute, but was wary. The two began following each other on Instagram and direct messaging.

“The nice part about meeting him on Instagram and kind of following each other for a good chunk of time,” Abby said, “is that I was able to check into his character — I mean, still from a distance, but I could see the things he was posting, what he wanted to stand for.”

They began dating in January 2021. Youssef moved to California for bit. The couple married in June 2022, with their ceremony captured on video, posted on YouTube.

“I remember as a little girl,” she said on her wedding day, “I would dream about this very day. Johnny, the love we have feels so familiar, not because any man has ever loved me like this before, but because God has been showing me his love since before I knew him.”

Youssef is not certain whether he’ll get the price he needs on the Rockhill house.

“In hindsight, it was a little bigger than I probably should have gone. I hope I don’t regret it,” he said. “But it was just sitting there. It just bothers me to see beautiful things just sitting there.”

Nor does he know if the wedding venue will succeed. But he has confidence. A wedding has already been scheduled for May.

“I have days,” Youssef said, “where I’m like, ‘You know, worst case, I’ll be a laughing stock. Maybe I’ll have to sell a lot of rentals. Get out. Break even.

“In America, I think, as the land of opportunity, you can fail. You can pull back. You hear stories of all the big people — Bill Gates, Elon Musk — if you start really reading history. It’s like, ‘Oh, he failed at this. He lost a billion dollars there. This worked. This didn’t.’

“If I take three steps, fail one, three steps, fail one, it’s much better than if I just take one step at a time. … I always dream big, and they happen. I’m not scared of failure.”