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Commercial Real Estate FAQ With Brian Burke On MultiFamily Apartment Building Investments

Why Do You Continue To Work In Multi Family?

The following Q&A was completed as part of our conversational Commercial Real Estate FAQ Interview Series, we hope you find it helpful.

While there are many different commercial real estate asset types to choose from, there’s nothing wrong with knowing what you know and staying in your lane. Staying in a class like multi-family when you’ve had proven success allows you to compound on those skills without the mistakes you may be making branching out into other asset types. Multi-family and industrial have proven to be more or less pandemic proof, and those focusing on multi-family right now are often navigating successful waters. 

Richard Wilson: And my final question here is why do you continue to work in multi-family? I mean, self-storage investors also like it, industrial is a hot sexy thing with the cloud exploding during the pandemic, multi-family, there’s a lot of people in the multi-family space. I know you just were able to raise a lot of money in just a month of your last offering openings. You’re doing very well in the space, so obviously there’s reasons. But why do you stick at it after all these years and stick to multi-family? 

Brian Burke: Well, I’ve been investing in real estate for 30 years. And in this career, I’ve had the good or bad fortune, however you want to look at it, to have done almost everything. I’ve subdivided and for residential subdivisions, I’ve built a resort hotel, I’ve built a self-storage facility, I’ve built single family homes, and I’ve built duplexes, and flipped houses, and just about everything you can do in real estate I’ve done it at one point or another. And our core business is multi-family, and there’s a very good reason for that. 

Number one, it’s our core competency. It’s what we are best at, and I always say that you do really well when you stay in your own lane. And what I’ve found is whenever I decide to get out of my lane and get into another lane to try something like self-storage or any of those other things, I always get my hands slapped. It never turns out the way I thought it would, because you always make mistakes. It’s easier for us to just do what we’re best at. We have a really deep experience bench in multi-family here so we stick to it. Now it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with self-storage and industrial, and I think those asset classes are great, it’s just not for us at this point in time. I think besides multi-family, if you look at the shining stars in commercial real estate right now, especially with the pandemic, the shining stars are industrial, and multi-family. Then everybody else is in another class by themselves; office, hospitality, retail, all of those are having individual struggles for a variety of somewhat related reasons. And multi-family is going to be one of the best performers through this malaise. 

Richard: Great, great, I appreciate you explaining that. 

About the author

Richard Wilson