Westlake is a fully vertically integrated real estate owner-operator. That’s the “what” but not the “why”. I’ve talked a lot about the “why” – it’s our family values and being stewards within our family and community. What we haven’t talked as much about is the “how.” As a family office, that’s where we differentiate ourselves…
Yesterday, I attended the annual USD Real Estate Conference. As with nearly every event I’ve been to this past year, AI was front and center. While real estate has traditionally been slow to embrace new technology, we’re now seeing AI meaningfully reshape how we invest and operate. One of the benefits of our diversified investment…
It’s often said that the job of a third generation family business is to institutionalize the business. From a business perspective this means raising our quality standards and raising outside capital for all our new deals to increase assets under management in a smart and focused manner. From a family management perspective, it means formalizing…
For a family business to survive, every generation has to reinvent what that business is. I’m sure there are some exceptions but, in my experience, I have found this largely to be true. Taking a business that is set in its ways and creating a new long-term strategy that can be executed over a 20-30…
Humans developed fear as a protection mechanism so we wouldn’t get eaten by lions. In today’s world, fear can protect us from real dangers like not walking across a highway into oncoming traffic but when fear starts to creep into our investment decisions it can have a real and negative impact. It’s something we see…
As a family office, we think about wealth preservation in after-tax terms. This is an important distinction. I get asked a lot why we do not just raise a fund. One of the main reasons is because we want to be able to 1031 in and out of investments which we can do by raising…
I’ve been asked a few times why my family picked self-storage as an investment thesis. It’s a combination of a few factors – platform, plan, and partners. Platform: My family currently has 27 on balance sheet properties (aka properties we own with our own capital). After spending the better part of the decade institutionalizing our…
I’ve spoken to several real estate investors who have zero allocation for development in 2024. Like most real estate decisions, the devil lies in the details, and there are still cases where development is exciting for us. Let’s take self-storage as an example. We are only looking at markets where existing properties are trading at…
I’m a big proponent of being a specialist and not a generalist. It all has to do with the concept of return on hassle. Sure there’s trying to maximize your return on investment and that’s pretty self explanatory but do you ever stop and think about return on hassle? It’s one of the main reasons…
The year is heating up and we are starting to look at more acquisition opportunities in self storage. Our target markets are secondary and tertiary markets in California, Utah, and New Mexico. For value add, our business plans are focused on ways to add revenue and reduce expenses. I thought it might be helpful this…
