https://youtu.be/Q7Czl8Z_nUw
Michael Episcope is the Co-CEO of Origin Investments, a private equity real estate firm designed for the needs of high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and wealth management firms. We discuss ways business owners can remove investment bias from their processes, why you need to consider investing in a fund, and how to make better decisions in business.
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Remove Investment Bias with Michael Episcope
Our guest is Michael Episcope, co-CEO of Origin Investments, a private real estate manager that builds, buys, and lends to multifamily real estate projects in fast-growing markets throughout the U.S. Michael, welcome to the show.
Steve, thanks for having me back.
It's great to have you. It's great to have you. And since we last spoke, things have changed. I was wondering if the introduction was even appropriate in a private real estate manager, or now you are a public real estate manager. I don't know what it is. But tell me a little bit about your story. How did you get into starting Origin Investments and what's been your entrepreneurial journey?
Yeah, well, first of all, the introduction still is correct. We're a private real estate manager. We do build, buy, and lend to multifamily real estate in Sunbelt States. And I'll take you back, I guess, I mean, not all the way back, but kind of to where we started origin. And that really happened in kind of 05, 06, 07, it was formalized in 07. But I came out of the commodity trading industry, so I had a very non-traditional route into real estate. I had cut my teeth down at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, I traded interest rates and that's where I made my wealth down there.
I think as a wealthy person, especially young, you become a little bit paranoid about making sure that you keep your wealth and you never say the five words of, “I used to be rich.” Trust me, I've known a lot of people who have said those words. My partner and I, we're just trading investment ideas back and forth and we wanted to be in alternatives. We didn't want to just be passive investors and put our money in the 60-40 portfolio. We believed in alternatives and especially in real estate and just the power of its ability to protect, to grow wealth, to produce income. And that's when we started, was in 2007. But it wasn't, we didn't have a very, what I'll call coherent vision back then.
The idea was just to invest our own money in real estate and protect it and grow it, produce the income streams, all the reasons why people get into real estate. I think as we were looking out at the market and evaluating the competition and we had both invested, we just realized that there weren't a lot of great opportunities for individual investors like us. We weren't big enough to have a true family office buying deals directly, but we also weren't, you know, kind of on the small end investing $50,000 to $100,000 into deals. And what you find is that either, you know, the institutions really, they are the ones who command the leverage because they're putting out so much money. And if you have $50,000 to $100,000, at least at that time, in ‘06, ‘07, you really didn't have a lot of options out there.
The idea was just to invest our own money in real estate and protect it and grow it, produce the income streams, all the reasons why people get into real estate.Share on X
The options weren't that great. And if you were somewhere in the middle, had a million or two million to invest kind of where we were in a deal. Even the good sponsors out there, what you would find, the ones who were marketing towards the retail investor, the individual investor, their fees were just incredibly high. They had great deals, but you didn't really create any wealth. And it was a buy, fix, sort of sell type model. And we were just like, “Look, we can do something better here as a group.” And what we decided to do is create an institutional real estate firm for the individual investor. In the beginning,