I’m Joe Stampone. I work at Atlas Real Estate Partners (‘AREP’), a private real estate investment firm focused on value-add and ground-up multifamily investments. ASotREG is a place where I share my thoughts on real estate, careers, technology, entrepreneurship, passive investing, and anything else that piques my interest.
My Experience with Seth Godin’s altMBA: Trust the Process
This past May I participated in altMBA, an intensive, 4-week online workshop designed by Seth Godin for individuals from around the world who want to "level up and lead". The 4-week sprint, conducted entirely online through Slack, Wordpress, and Zoom, included 12 project prompts (3 each week) covering topics such as goal setting, business models, decision-making, empathy, change agents, leverage and constraints, opportunity costs, and boundaries. Each prompt built off the lessons learned in the previous one. It was the most challenging 30 days of my life. There was an overwhelming amount...
Landing Your First Analyst Job in Commercial Real Estate
Having conversations with industry experts and talking as little about yourself as possible is the best way to learn. It's why I love the blog format so much - I get to engage with interesting people and invite them to share their experiences with all of you. I love being the less knowledgeable person in the conversation and asking the simple questions. In this post, Spencer Burton, a co-author of Adventures in CRE (A.CRE), shares his experiences and thoughts on landing your first analyst job in commercial real estate. Although this is a topic I've written about before, Spencer's...
Why You Need an Informational and Analytical Edge in Real Estate
One of my favorite podcasts is ‘Invest Like the Best’ hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy. He has a mix if incredible guests from all ends of the finance world (venture capital, authors, researchers, portfolio managers), and recently did an episode on quantitative investors. Institutional investing is becoming increasing quant-driven and firms are utilizing all sorts of tools and data-sets to produce alpha. To a layman, the sophistication of these shops is almost unimaginable (you quickly realize it’s impossible for a retail investor to compete!). Investors are utilizing a wide-range of...
How to Source Off-Market Real Estate Deals
Real estate is both a local and relationship-driven business. When looking for operating partners, Atlas seeks teams who exhibit niche business strategies in well-defined geographies, local connectivity, micro-market knowledge, and a proven track record of successful execution. The local focus and niche strategy enable operators to source coveted ‘off-market deals’. In this post, I want to explore some of the strategies around off-market deal sourcing. Before I get into the actual techniques, let me reiterate that these are only effective if you have a niche investment strategy,...
Juniper Square: the Real Estate Investment Management System Designed to Scale
Over the past 7 years, the Atlas portfolio and investor network has grown exponentially. What started as an intimate group of friends and family, has ballooned to a robust network of 400+ individual high-net-worth investors. Over time, the administrative burden of managing 1,200+ investor positions across 30+ deals making quarterly distributions became overwhelming. Here’s what our quarterly reporting process looked like: Draft a 3-5 page quarterly summary for each deal in MS Word, plug in an income statement in Excel, convert the document to PDF, and email to each investor through...
My Thoughts on the Massive Impact Autonomous Cars Will Have on Real Estate
I still think autonomous cars will create more billionaires in real estate and retail than in tech or manufacturing. Just as cars did. — Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) August 29, 2016 Autonomous cars will be pervasive in the next 5-10 years. They will be safer and more efficient than human drivers and they’ll all be electronic. There’s no doubt autonomous cars are coming soon and the impact on the real estate industry will be massive. However, very few in the real estate industry is talking about it and even less are preparing for the impact it could have on their business. Over the past...
How Origin Investments Raised $10 Million of Equity in 1 Week: Part 2
In September, Ben Harris, head of investor relations for Origin Investments, shared the approach that enabled Origin to raise over $4M of capital online in a single week. Ben walked through the keys to building trust with investor’s online and aligning interest with investment partners. However, what resonated with me most, was Origin's focus on the ‘long game’. When investing in private real estate deals, investors are often making a 10-year commitment, and sometimes longer. With that time-horizon in mind, the integrity of the people you’re investing with far outweighs the fundamentals...
Attention Real Estate Investors: It’s Important to Build Relationships with Operators
At Atlas, we have over 400 HNW individuals who’ve invested in our deals. Today, following several successful exits, the strong performance of current deals, and attractiveness of cash-flowing real estate, we have more demand from investors than we do quality opportunities. While we do our best to run a fair process, the reality is that not all investors will get the opportunity to invest in each deal. When raising capital for a new deal, we first go out to our VIP investors who’ve been with us from the beginning. Through that network of ~30 investors, we typically fill ~75% of the...
Where do Great Real Estate Deals Come From? 3 Real World Examples
The most challenging aspect of doing your own real estate deals, especially early on, is sourcing great opportunities. It’s finding that first deal that you’re willing to stake your entire reputation on and go all-in. While I’ve shared the secret to deal sourcing and how entrepreneurial real estate operators efficiently source deals, the truth is that great deals don’t come from any one source. Rather, great deals are sourced by great operators. Great operators who’ve established a great reputation and network. Great operators who know their asset class and market inside and out. Great...
10 Federal: Embracing Technology to Outperform the Competition
One of the many great things about the real estate business is diversity of people and backgrounds. Throughout my series of Sponsor Features I’ve highlighted individuals who were born to be entrepreneurs and others worked at best-in-class institutions before going off on their own. The commonality, however, is their passion, resilience, and hunger to succeed. Brad Minsely, co-founder of 10 Federal, was born to be an entrepreneur; as a kid he bought candy in bulk and sold it individually at a mark-up, he then spent the first 13 years of his career at an entrepreneurial real estate firm. He...
How Entrepreneurial Real Estate Operators Efficiently Source and Screen Deals
I talk to a lot of entrepreneurial real estate operators. Some are just starting out. Others have successfully built a platform and scaled up. While others started and failed. Although there are countless challenges (well, at least 71!) these entrepreneurs face in their day-to-day, the single biggest challenge for all of them is the ability to efficiently source and vet deals. When there are a million things going on, how do you determine what to spend your time on? This is a problem I face in my day-to-day at Atlas. Here are a few ways that we’ve attacked this challenge: Get Hyper Niche:...
A Day in the Life of a Real Estate Entrepreneur Featuring Arx Urban Founder, Benjie Moll
I’ve said it many times before, doing your own deals and building a real estate is incredibly hard. It takes great timing and some good luck, and even then there is no guarantee of success. Rather than restate it, I’ve asked Arx Urban founder, Benjie Moll, to describe his “typical day” and share the 10 biggest challenges of being a real estate entrepreneur. Enter Benjie: Since I last wrote for the blog in June 2015, Arx Urban has made significant progress in our urban workforce housing and retail aggregation strategy. We’re approaching our third year and are beginning to see some...
5 Things I Learned in 2016 and 5 Goals for 2017
Happy New Year, everybody! I spent the past week down in South Florida, almost entirely disengaged from the internet and work (the harder it’s been to do, the important it’s become). I took advantage of the slow work week to reflect upon all that was accomplished this past year, celebrating the wins, and planning for the year ahead. 2016 was another great year for the blog, with all key metrics improving, better reader engagement, and an increased interest from the real estate industry. The Metrics Total Posts: 34 Total Comments: 205 Total Unique Site Visitors: 105,174 Total Pageviews:...
5 Ways to be an Entreployee Within Your Real Estate Company
After reading James Altucher’s book, Choose Yourself, I’ve been devouring his content (blog, podcast, books). He’s fascinating and focuses much of his content on how to be successful in the new economy. He’s a big proponent of starting a business, platform, or lifestyle where your fate is not tied to your boss. Incomes have been going down and relying on a job, promotion, and retirement savings is a thing of the past. Furthermore, the demand for middle-class jobs are disappearing, being replaced by automation and outsourcing. In today’s world, as James puts it, you must ‘choose yourself’....
Evaluating Investment Performance – A Look at the Past and Going Forward
Anyone who bought commercial real estate over the past 7 years enjoyed the benefits of cap rate compression. Many investments, despite being mismanaged or poorly operated, provided extraordinary returns for investors. When looking at operators track records, how does one discern whether returns were driven by value-creation or simply good market timing? In this post, Matt Lasky, Managing Partner at Equity Velocity Funds shares how investors can evaluate past performance and 5 takeaways for investing in today’s market. -- The commercial real estate industry has experienced a period of...
Not Everyone is Cut Out to be a Real Estate Entrepreneur
Earlier this year I discussed why you’re not ready to buy your own deals. Doing your own deals and growing a real estate firm is not only hard, it’s not for everyone. Most real estate professionals get into the business to be entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial spirit is part of what makes this such a great business. The narrative in business and real estate today is that everyone should be an entrepreneur, however, the reality is that most of us are not cut out to be entrepreneurs and we’re doing ourselves a disservice by trying to force ourselves to be...
BLDG’ing a Real Estate Firm is Harder than you can Imagine (but worth it!)
“Real estate professionals get into the business to be entrepreneurs.” That’s a phrase I use a lot on the blog. I’ve written posts about the entrepreneurial nature of the business, the challenges of starting a real estate investment firm, and how hard it is to start your own firm during a hot market. I want to add a caveat to the phrase; “real estate professionals get into the business to be entrepreneurs, but real estate entrepreneurship is littered with failure.” This interview is a post-mortem on a venture that did not succeed, whose founders are willing to share a candid look at the...
Alturas Capital: Born to be a Real Estate Entrepreneur
‘Real estate is an entrepreneurial business’ is a phrase I throw around a lot on this site. It’s true, but what does it even mean? It’s a combination of two things; first, many real estate professionals get into the business to ultimately become entrepreneurs. Secondly, success in real estate, whether on your own or within a larger organization, requires entrepreneurial thinking. Blake Hansen, Managing Partner at Alturas Capital, is the quintessential ‘entrepreneur’ who stumbled upon investing at a young age. He started out at age 11 investing in stocks, growing his portfolio to $150K in...
When Investing in Real Estate Invest with the Best Sponsor and Ignore Everything Else
I spend a lot of time on this blog analyzing deal structures, return metrics, risk-adjusted returns, and the impact of fees. While all that stuff is meaningful, it shouldn’t be the main driver of your investment decisions. Instead, focus your efforts first on finding a top quality sponsor. If there’s anything I learned about value-add real estate investing over the past 6 years, it’s that the success or failure of a deal is driven almost entirely by the quality of the sponsor. Here are 20 reasons to ignore all the noise and invest with a great sponsor. Great sponsors understand their...
How Origin Investments Raised $4 Million in Equity in 1 Week: Part 1
With the passing of the JOBs Act in 2013, private real estate investing has become much more accessible to accredited investors. This has led to the emergence of crowdfunding marketplaces and the ability for companies to generally solicit, enabling investors to connect directly with sponsors all over the country looking to raise money from retail investors. The new transparency in the private real estate syndication space, a business that was previously 100% relationship-based, has led to increased competition. Syndicators are now competing directly with each other for investment capital....