Where are the accounts of the great real estate investors?

[LR1400]

Now all that being said, I think that the reason that there's not so much talk or advertising of real estate billionaires is because long term real estate is an inferior asset class to business and equity. You also don't hear a lot about Treasury or muni bonds billionaires either (though they exist). Real estate is not a good way to get rich, but it's a great way to stay rich. People love a good rags to riches story, but don't get so animated about an inherited wealth whose recipients haven't blown it story.

 

Man, I don't know about that. There are lots and lots of people that have tremendous wealth from real estate investing alone. The use of leverage, positive cash flow, and typically an appreciating asset makes it a solid asset class.

 

I'm not sure what kind of net worth you guys are thinking but I know a professor, a small restaurant owner, and multiple other small business owners each have a net worth over $10 mil. In a town of 30,000 people. The money they made in their small business or job was invested into real estate and that's where the majority of their net worth is. In a larger city the number is probably $50 mil.

 

I think it is a temperament based decision primarily.

[Morgan]

Not sure how much is out there on him but I believe Donald Bren is one of, if not the wealthiest real estate mogul in the United States:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bren

 

His brother, Peter, has also done well and is one of the partners of KBS, a real estate advisor that manages real estate portfolios for institutional clients and non-traded REITs on the retail side.

 

Donald Bren is pretty interesting. He is the richest real estate developer in the US with a net worth of $15 billion. He bought 10,000 acres in the southern California boonies in 1963 and then built a 250,000 person city in the coming decades. Another huge stroke of luck was when his company was purchased for $34m in 1970 and sold back to him two years later for $22m. I mean come on... how much better could that get? An extra $12m to grow your company? That's just incredibly lucky. That being said, you still have to execute very well to grow that large. Anyways, later he and some partners bought the Irvine company that had another 100,000 acres to develop on.

 

He is very secretive and not much is known about his company. Supposedly he has 500 office properties, about 50 shopping centers and at least 50,000 apartments. He has gotten mostly good press from what I have seen except some negative press from the OC Weekly. See some of the links below:

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/donald-brens-highway-robbery-6420022

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/web-extra-the-real-donald-bren-with-commentary-6477118

http://media.ocweekly.com/6016594.0.jpg

[Jurgis]

Donald Bren is in some sense like that Italian guy: I admit he executed great, but he also chose the right place at the right time to start and build.

 

Building on both of these stories, a bunch of Lithuanians made quite OK money in RE because they moved to US/Canada after WW2 and RE was the thing they knew how to do. Not big stuff, but couple houses or apartment buildings. And sure CA was one of the places to do it: huge LA expansion. I even know some post-Soviet immigrants who did it great in CA: if you came in 1990s, the appreciation was still pretty good there, plus buy-renovate-rent/sell.

 

Still I wonder if some of these people would have made better money in stock market (e.g. buying BRK or Wesco ;) ).

Oh yeah, Munger also did well in RE because he was in CA.