An Asset Manager’s Take On Real Estate (And Lessons Learned Over The Last 15 Years)

In this episode, we interview Roofstock's Director of Asset Management, Caroline Parker, about her diverse career path and the what she has learned about real estate along the way. --- Transcript    Tom: Greetings, and welcome to the remote real estate investor. I'm joined in this interview with,   Michael: Michael Albaum.   Tom: On this episode, we have Caroline Parker, who is the director of asset management Roofstock. And with Carolina, we're gonna be talking about asset management. What is it, we're also going to spend quite a bit of time going through Caroline's history and her all the different jobs that she's had super interesting working at student housing, working at big asset management companies working at John Burns. So let's get into it. Caroline Parker, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.   Caroline: Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.   Tom: So we before we get into the meat of discussion, let's go ahead and talk about your background. We've had john burns on the episode on the show before we've you know, touched on some other places in your history. So why don't you take us back from the beginning?   Caroline Okay, great. Well, I have a bit of a unique background. I started in banking for four and a half years in Charlotte, North Carolina. I was an analyst in the investment banking division at Wachovia when it became insolvent. Then I worked through the merger with Wells Fargo, and eventually made my foray into real estate by joining Greystar Real Estate partners at their headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina, they're already became an asset manager and REO portfolio, and eventually moved into a unique role where I got to support the C suite, helping them with projects and being their ears and eyes of the organization and getting to participate in the things like investment committee and executive.   Tom: So that was the heat of everything. Right, right in 2009, as a Wachovia got purchased, am I going back in time and thinking of that correctly?   Caroline: Yeah. Yeah. The big downturn, so it was a crazy time to be in banking analyst, so I got to watch everything feel relatively less impacted in some of my work senior colleagues.   Tom: Awesome. Cool. So you merge into this new position supporting the C suite?   Caroline: Yeah. So that's where I really got to learn the housing industry. From a very high level strategic standpoint, I really understand, you know, the different facets of real estate or multifamily world from development and acquisitions to property manage. And so it was a really amazing experience. And I fell in love with, with rental and investment in the housing industry from that point on. So from there, I moved out to California for personal reasons. And I thought, well, how am I going to combine my experience from with greystar Real Estate partners and banking, I thought, Hey, I'll go into multifamily capital.   So from there, I was helping underwrite loans, multi, like from Fannie and Freddie to on balance sheet loans. And I really learned how to pick out outliers, how to ask critical questions about you know, asset performance, but what I really wanted to know and what's really driving those numbers, you know, how to, how do you really ask critical questions? And how do you really ascertain what is a good investment and what not. So from there, I knew that I needed to go back to the owner operator side.   So I decided to join the Irvine company and their apartments division, and I joined their new asset management team, they hired a whole new team of people to come in and really dive into their database and kind of change the way that division with making decisions truly using data collectively across all the cross functional silos and the division. So that was a really exciting experience where I really got my arms around operation, and how do those decisions each individual decision made on site? How does it really change the financial performance of