Jeff Smalls knows how to adapt to the ups and downs of the real estate market.

When the Great Recession hit, the co-founder and CEO of development and investment firm MDH Partners headed to the United Kingdom, earned a degree from Oxford University and started a career as a best-selling author of political and religious suspense novels.

Now, with industrial property in high demand, he's put his pen aside to focus on real estate.

"Our business has been so crazy over the last few years, I haven't had as much time to think about my writing," Small said in an interview. "But it's definitely something, when I have time, I enjoy doing."

But Small isn't complaining. The robust industrial market over the past several years has helped him guide his business that manages discretionary funds on behalf of institutional investors into new markets. Every investment MDH Partners has completed, or sold since its founding in 2005 has returned more than 30% rate of return to investors, according to the Atlanta-based firm.

Small grew up in one of Atlanta's well-established commercial real estate families. His late grandfather, Mark D. Hodges, founded real estate firm M.D. Hodges Enterprises in 1958, and it became a dominant player in the Atlanta industrial market. However, Small picked a career in law before going into the family business and taking over as president and CEO of M.D. Hodges Enterprises in 1997.

Two years later, he orchestrated the sale of the firm to Blackstone in a deal that foreshadowed the emergence of private equity firms snapping up development companies. He stayed at the helm of M.D. Hodges under Blackstone ownership until 2005 when it sold M.D. Hodges to ING Clarion in a deal Small said generated a return of more than 26% for Blackstone investors.

After the business sold, Small launched MDH Partners, the name paying homage to his grandfather and the family firm. Since then, MDH has partnered with Blackstone, the arm of Harvard University that oversees its endowment and with other institutional investors.

During the Great Recession, Small took advantage of the economic slowdown to get away from commercial real estate. That's when Small, who holds an undergraduate degree from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard, left the States to study religion in the U.K. He also traveled to Bhutan on the edge of Himalayas mountain range and to India to seek additional spiritual enlightenment.

"Even though I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Atlanta, I spent time traveling through India and in the Middle East studying yoga and meditation, and then during the GFC, took off a year and went to Oxford in England," Small said. "Since there wasn't any real estate going on in real estate, I went and got a masters of religious studies there. And so I kind of took what had started to be kind of this personal journey and exploration that was kind of leading some writing to a more academic direction and then ended up publishing the books."

He published "The Breath of God," his first novel in early 2011. The story about a graduate student traveling to the Himalayas in search of the truth surrounding an ancient mystery centered on religion, simultaneously held the No. 1 position on Amazon's list of best-selling political thrillers and religious studies books.

Small published his second novel, "The Jericho Deception," two years later. It made it to No. 8 on Amazon's best-selling fiction books when it came out. His novel writing and study of world religions have influenced Small in two major ways, he said.

"First, these intellectual pursuits help me keep an open mind and think through the daily issues in our business from different perspectives. I try to challenge myself to find creative solutions to how we approach investing just as I do in my writing," he said. "Second, my theological interests also meld with our commitment to ESG as a company and the significant strides we have made in those areas over the past few years.

MDH's mission, he said, is to manage funds that yield high returns for its investors while also striving "to make our small part of the world a better place. Having all of our investors as large non-profit institutions aligns our mission with theirs, which also dovetails with my own personal philosophy and spiritual outlook."

While most of the firm's properties and developments are in the Sun Belt, MDH now is in 33 markets from Northern Pennsylvania to Southern California. Its current fund, known as MDH Fund II, has $750 million in equity, and when combined with debt has about $2 billion in buying power. Small said about half of the fund's capital has been deployed.

During his 30 years in real estate, Small has watched the industrial property sector morph from being dominated by small to medium-sized warehouses to one where million-square-foot big boxes, and more and more multistory fulfillment centers, are commonplace across the country.

His grandfather, who Small considers visionary, would have seen the metamorphosis coming, he said.

"He probably would have said, I told you so. He was always someone who was just well ahead of his time, and he was known for building buildings that were a step ahead of the competition," Small said of Mark D. Hodges. "He would build higher clear heights, larger truck courts when they weren't really needed. And those trends you saw over the last decades as you had larger retailers meeting these big boxes to the big e-commerce companies, that those really modern features became essential in the buildings, he was thinking that way back in the 1980s."

Small wants to work on more fiction, but he's waiting until the market really slows. He does find time to meditate at least twice a week, but something had to give. So he has no plans to return to competitive ballroom dancing, where he and his wife Alison Small were named national amateur champions in the early 2000s, and will wait until the time is right to return to writing.

"I've got a couple of other books that I've been playing with for the last few years but have been so busy in the heyday of our space that I haven't had quite as much time to work on those," Small said.