I didn't recognize real estate as the tangible yet personal element it is until I was older, but looking back it was underneath most of what we do to exist. Places we socialize, entertain, eat, live, I've always loved going to these places. New cities, new hotels, traveling somewhere I hadn't been just to see what it was actually like to be there. That turned out to be the business I ended up in, and I didn't clock it at the time.
Running right alongside all of that was a vast passion for technology. I was using it constantly and tried pretty much everything, coding, building a couple of small apps, pulling software apart just to see how it worked underneath. Neither one of those was a plan. They were just the two things I was genuinely into, and they've ended up being the two things I do now.
What pulled me toward real estate specifically is that it's the only version of finance that's also physical and human. A model just has numbers in it. A property has numbers, and a building, and the people living in it. Housing is a need, every city runs on it, and the thought of being able to either add true improvement both to the economy yet to the day to day of peoples lives, hit a nerve that has kept me on the page I am on now. I spent a year in residential brokerage early on to see how that side of the business worked, came out of it knowing it wasn't for me, and went to USC for real estate development. The various courses, programs, teachers and mentors as a conglomerate, showed me what this industry has to offer, has led me down this journey.
My first job out of school was at Tides Equities, an LA-based asset management firm running a Sunbelt portfolio across Texas, Nevada and Arizona. At its peak Tides was around 30,000 units and $7B in AUM with roughly 50 employees. I came in as an analyst under a single asset manager whose portfolio was 13 properties, mostly Dallas Fort Worth with a couple in Phoenix. I ran the market research behind our outlook on those assets, underwrote the deals and competitors across Dallas and Phoenix, and managed CapEx programs directly with the vendors doing the process. Within a year, that had grown into deals in basically every market we were in, and it went from one asset manager to three, with me taking charge on 40+ assets and over $3B in total gross AUM.
What that job gave me was volume. You watch the same problem turn up in about fifteen different costumes and you start to see how they stack on each other. I showed up able to build a model and I left knowing whether one would hold, whether a trend is defensible where that specific asset really sits, and which lines you can pull back on without paying for it later.
The most useful thing I took out of it isn't something people put on a resume though. I learned property management from the property manager's side.
I spent a lot of time with PMs and they told me what their days actually look like. The pressure of sitting in between the owner and the resident, and all the problems they inherit that were never theirs to begin with. Asset managers don't see most of it, because the PM absorbs it long before it ever reaches us, and what ends up happening is that a lot of asset managers treat their PM like a reporting line instead of like the person running the asset. I don't, and it's probably the biggest advantage I have. Most of what shows up looking like an asset management problem is really a property management problem nobody surfaced in time.
I've since moved over to Miramar Capital Advisors, a real equity private equity shop that runs an institutional process on its deals and on how it operates. In this role as asset manager I take the lead on the day to day decisions across 10 deals including: pricing adjustments, the annual budgets, building out the business plan and getting the full plan in place, and the investor and lender relationships that sit on top of all of it, including site trips. I also work with the asset management team on our build-to-rent platform, which is new product with teams we're building in house rather than shifting out to Third-Party PMs. That side runs across both houses, so it's coordinating between the asset and property management teams, driving lease-up execution and spearheading marketing efforts.
Somewhere in there the technology half of my background finally turned out to be useful. I've built a handful of my own processes into the recurring work through AI: first-draft budget files built off my own numbers and how I actually approach a budget, the weekly reporting, weekly marketing updates, property file reviews and market surveys. I still work over all of it and the judgment stays mine, it just takes the setup out of the front of every week.