Our Origin Story: Platform, Plan, and Partners

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 own business with best practices I learned during my time as an operator in the public REIT space and investing in other real estate private equity funds as a LP, our platform had the capital and team to increase assets under management and take on external capital. Kelly Chang Levine and I cannot underscore how lucky we feel to have found and retained a best-in-class team who make it fun to come to work every day. Only with this team in place did we feel comfortable co-investing with our family and friends. Many of them had reached out over the years for the opportunity to directly co-invest with us in a vehicle where they too could benefit from the deferral of capital gains tax through a 1031 exchange but we did not want to pursue this until we were truly ready.

Plan: We looked at a number of different investment theses across different asset classes within real estate (i.e. office, retail, multifamily, industrial, hotel, etc.) and across different asset sizes (large, medium, and small). We determined pretty quickly that being an aggregator in the middle market space would be the right size fit for us. We looked at a number of different niche asset classes including self-storage, cold storage, outdoor industrial storage, student housing, short-term rentals, single family for rent, build to rent, active adult communities, and last mile logistics centers to name a few. We came up with a short list of niche asset classes we liked.

Partner: We sought to find a partner who was an expert in one of the niche spaces that we liked. We were looking for people with great access to deals and who were excellent operators. We could provide them with capital, the power of our platform (checks and balance on their underwriting, asset managers, accounting, back office fund administration, etc.), and our network of family and friends investors. After meeting with dozens of sponsors, I met Bryan Grissinger from Frontera Real Estate Investments. We met through a mutual friend in San Diego and instantly hit it off. Six deals and three years later, we feel lucky to be working with Bryan and his team and we are really loving the self-storage space. We have purchased 5 facilities with a 6th currently under development and hope to do at least a few deals this year to take advantage of the dislocation in the market.

These factors sum up why we are in self storage and why it works for our family business. I also want to highlight that of these three factors, partners are most important. Like anything in business, it always comes down to the people.