Investing Billions - E355: From Deal-by-Deal to a $6.5B Platform: Building a Real Estate Investment Empire

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

What if the best investments aren’t found in chaos—but in having the discipline to act when others can’t? In this episode, I sit down with Darren Fisk, Founder of Forum Investment Group, to discuss how he scaled from early syndication deals to a fully integrated multifamily investment platform managing billions. Darren breaks down how he leaned in during the 2008 financial crisis to acquire 9,000 units, why focusing on distressed capital structures rather than distressed assets created asymmetric opportunities, and how flexibility across the capital stack allows investors to generate returns in any market.

So it's 2008. It was a global financial crisis. Most people were panicking. You went on this run of buying properties. You bought 9,000 units. How did you do that? Well, it's easy to make up a story looking in the rearview mirror, but obviously liquidity disappeared.

People, I always say, had two black eyes and the broken nose. And fear really dominated the overall market. And we kind of did the opposite, not recklessly, but because we had great partners that it always kind of supported us over the years and just found this opportunity to go take advantage of others misfortunes. I hate to really say that that way, but people were in trouble. We were able to step in and we weren't buying distress necessarily assets. We were really buying distressed capital tax. And again, liquidity, panic, everybody was uncomfortable. And so you had these four sellers. HUD was, you know,

liquidating pools of brand new assets. Everything was for sale and there was no bid. Maybe go a little bit upstream of that. You had already built a reputation, which allowed you to go out and purchase these 9,000 units. Telling about the importance of building those relationships ahead of time. I call it integrity. A lot of folks may call it something different, but we had really created people's trust. And this went back to 2003 with an old partner of mine when, you know, I met folks from my local gym, doctors, attorneys, lawyers. They were given us capital to go by our first few deals. And we had started to prove a track record. We had created this. momentum. And then when 08 hit, we had had great returns, great transparency. We had built our

reporting, you know, standards. So folks were actually really comfortable with us. So it wasn't a matter of would they do it. It's if we were getting behind it. And they, the one question they'd always ask is how much money are you and your parents putting in? My dad was a school principal. So, you know, it didn't have a ton, but they were all in with us. And that's really what built the foundation for us to go take advantage in that, you know, 2008, say 2009 to 12, buying those 9,000 units. Obviously, you're not impervious to fear just like the rest of the market. What set you guys apart and what operating principles lets you play offense whenever everyone was playing defense? So first thing was we didn't have any problems. And we were

primarily in the secondary and tertiary markets, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Fort Collins, you know, Colorado. My background had been real estate lending. So I always tell folks, I'm a recovering lender. We did it. We would underwrite conservative. We focused on basis. And this was a time where we're buying things for 40,000, 60,000 a unit that had been built for a hundred plus thousand a unit. And we were focused opportunistically on markets that had job diversity, durability. We weren't going to, you know, kind of a town that was a one-trick pony. If that one employer in that town left, we were kind of left high and dry. So that's really what gave us the conviction. But you, David, you said something. It was operating. And so at that time,

when you're operating in the secondary and tertiary markets and we were doing our own property management, we would buy our own flat roof coating machines and we were doing our own parking lots. And so that hands-on management at the time really gave us the benefit to go in and kind of even on top of the great basis eke out more operationally when people and even residents were uncertain of the economic future. That's ironic because today with the amount of, you know, states that we operate, we actually don't have property management today, but that operating side during those times when we were kind of going into one area and people were really mobile to move with us, meaning our employees on the property management side, that made a huge difference.

There's these different terms that people use in the institutional world. And my least favorite term is allocating. It's extremely positive. Then you could have investing. And then I think the best term is actually owning. What assets do you want to own? In this case, you were literally owning and literally operating those assets. So you knew it on a much more granular scale than, say, an investor or an allocator.

I never say an allocator because I love that you brought that up because allocators mean that good market or bad market, you have to put money to work. And at forum, we've always taken a little different approach that we want to have a flexible mandate. And I'm a believer there is an opportunity throughout every market cycle. Just like what we've seen over the last few years, not a ton on the acquisition side, development really slow, but a ton of opportunity on the real estate, debt and credit sides. It reminds me of financier, Bernard Baruch, 20th century financier that had this quote,

the most difficult time to invest us now. One of the themes I've seen over the last three years of this podcast is every single time, everybody says we're in a very uncertain time. It's a very difficult time to invest. It has not changed over three years. Markets have gone down and up. When markets are up, then you worry about things being overpriced. When markets are down, you worry about the next recession and things going further down. There is no perfect market. No, there really isn't. But again, another learning lesson going back to the allocator. If you're diversified in what you do as a company, there always should be an opportunity. I use the example, David, is a single family homebuilder.

The GFC in 2008, we had a few investors that were single family home builders with us, and they filed bankruptcy. And so I never wanted to be just a quote unquote single family home builder. That's why we built the different strategies and solutions we have all in multifamily, right, up and down the capital stack. So those were lessons learned, if you will, along the way that you want to have that diversity and not be forced to just invest or allocate capital. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster, and do it with leaner teams.

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The first to see wins. The rest follow. Learn more at Alpha-Sense, dot com slash how I invest. I want to go back to something that you said, which was really interesting. I think it's very emblematic of difficult times. You didn't even go out and buy 9,000 units that were selling for the lowest price. Because there were so much supply and so little demand, you were able to cherry pick

otherwise great units. And I think that's lost on a lot of people during crises is because there's so much panic in the market, you're able to make these quote unquote obvious traits. For me, during the COVID, I was able to invest into Robin Hood alongside Sequoia. And it was like this once in a lifetime opportunity where Sequoia was coming and saying, hey, do you want to invest with me? It's a very rare thing. And of course, a lot of family offices didn't want to back me at that point because they said,

well, it's COVID, you know, let us know when there's a better market. Of course, these opportunities really come once in the generation. But I think there's this mistaken belief that you have to make some heroic action and some very contrarian or very difficult to price asset, where in reality, when things are really difficult, just having a steady mind allows you to make the obvious investment. Why did we lean in the GFC? Why are we leaning in now? And I would say it's conviction.

And again, it's the Warren Buffett be fearful when others are greedy and greedy, when other are fearful. Go with your gut. And whenever I went against my gut, it was the wrong thing. Looking back, it's easy to make up a story. But having that conviction when others are scared. And, you know, human nature, like even in the markets today, the broader market, it's not just real estate.

When you see the choppiness, when you see oil up, when you see the Iran War, what do people typically do? nothing, they sit still. That's the time to look under the cracks and say, hey, where is the opportunity? And that's what forum is really good at doing is, you know, evolving, always asking questions, you know, where is the opportunity, what are we missing?

And that's what kind of has set us apart and allowed us to find these outsized returns and not be quote unquote the market like a big huge fund that's an allocator. It's the beta, right? Like public REITs today are beta. They're so big. It's like an aircraft carrier to turn them around. They've got to do billions of dollars in investments. And when you have the ability to be nimble and opportunistic investors, that's where do you create alpha if you have that conviction. I call that below the headline trade. I had the CIO of Texas Tech University. And he was actually investing into office spaces today. And if you ask anyone, that's the craziest trade. But he was able, because the headline was so bad, because so many people were ignoring the asset class, he went below there. And, And similarly to you, went to secondary cities and went to where there's a lot of job identification,

he was able to get these amazing trades because most people could not get past the headline. So there's these almost obvious below the headline trades in every single market that on a risk-adjusted basis make a lot of sense, but nobody wants to do that because they're afraid of the headline. So we started the podcast talking about how you got started, how you scale during the global financial crisis.

Fast forward 20 years or so. Today, you're at $6.5 billion. And a couple of years ago, you decided to go from this deal by deal contract to a fund contract. Why did you do that? I go back to the 08. If you guys remember, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, two banks that are no longer around. We learned something from every downturn. And one of the things we learned there was money was free and it was really cheap. And so the deal by deal model worked, number one, for us and it built our foundation. But it really limited scale and efficiency. So every raise we did was a transaction. Every deal required a new capital stack.

And what I realized after the OA downturn was lenders instead of doing 80 plus percent, you know, loans now today, like on construction, are doing 55 or 60. And then you couple that on the lending side with inflation, the cost going up. And I just realized on top of those platform is probably the best word for it. Our platform was a deal by deal. And to go raise and send out an offering memorandum on a one-off basis to raise what used to be $10 million, then $20 was now. 30 or 40. It just wasn't scalable. I couldn't really see this company being more than just the next deal versus where we are today where we're an investment manager and platform. It's taken the better part of a decade to turn this whole ship around where we have built the foundation to go as

high as we want. Otherwise, we would have been like a tree with limbs and no roots. It would have been all about the next deal versus what is the strategy or what are the solutions we're going after. So it was a hard transition, but in front of me at the time, it was very obvious that I didn't really have a business. I just had a collection of a bunch of deals. What needed to change going from deal by deal to a fund? What it allowed us to do in the hardest thing I've done in my career is combined a real estate firm with an investment manager. So it was that shift of building an investment management platform that means you need compliance and you need tax and you need legal and fund operations. So it was really taken the time to attract deeper and more sophisticated talent and candidly.

We outgrew a lot of the talent over this evolution over the next 20 years or this last 20 years. Get to where we are today in the foundation and on the platforms that we are. One of the things we talked about last time that we chatted is the right product for the right market. In other words, the right financial product for the right investor base. How did you go about building this out? What have you learned through this process? What I learned was don't ever tell the market what you want to do. They'll tell you very quickly what they want you to do.

What's an example of that? When we first launched what is now our interval fund, we did it as a closed end. We raised 50 million bucks, had an idea seven years ago in real estate credit space and did it as a closed end fund. I said, okay, once we get a track record, we converted it into a 40-day tender fund. Well, a tender fund when you're going after RAA's registered investment advisors have subdocs. Most advisors don't want to fill out subdocs. So we made that misstep. And I said, look, what we need to do is go out to the RAA market.

What's the right solution from them? So we put together eight different folks at a half a day kind of offsite with them. And they said, look, we would love this product if it were in an interval fund with a ticker. So hence, a couple of missteps. Even though our performance again was great, it just took us that time to realize we should have done not the middle step is where I went wrong, the tender fund. What I should have done is gone from closed end fund into interval fund, point and click, ticker symbol now. It's on Schwab, Fidelity, LPL, and the likes. So the lesson learned from that as we did other vehicles is we brought advisors together saying, hey, here's a, you know, equity vehicle that we're looking at doing.

What's the right wrapper, if you will, or what's the right structure rather than us, trying and thinking that we know what the market wants. And the lesson there isn't on the vehicle. It's on the process to determine what the vehicle is. And it's engaging essentially your customers, which are the investors and your unique customers to figure out exactly what they need. That's right.

And I think the key lesson is capital isn't homogenous. Product design really matters. You famously did a project for Google, aka Alphabet. Tell me about that. And where were your lessons there? Yeah, so kind of fell into that. We had the first opportunity I mentioned the beginning that we built in Boulder, Colorado, right next door, we did an assemblage.

And we thought it would be more multifamily, maybe some mixed use. As we had our plans going, Google came knocking and said, look, we want to do an expansion. A couple of things, the lesson wasn't just about doing a development. It was about creating credibility that we had the team that these large counterparties wanted alignment with us. They wanted predictability. They wanted communication. And it really elevated the standards that we had to operate at.

You know, they're operating at the highest level. we had to as well. And once you learn how to operate at that high level, you really can't go backwards. So yes, it was a development. Yes, it was a very successful development. They eventually ended up buying it from us. But putting together the right team and creating that credibility was probably a defining moment for our company. You were a college football player. You were on many great teams and you today have to manage teams. Talk to me about this evolution of deal by deal buying 9,000 units, building a fund. How did you upscale your team?

And how did you get the best out of your team? I was just interviewed, you know, about a book on leadership. And it was fascinating. You know, I always say there are three types of people who work. They're leaders, their managers and doers. And I feel like I'm a great leader and a great doer. I'm an awful manager. Really, David, like, there was never one aha moment.

And I have a saying that leaders ask questions. And it sounds very trivial. But it's always asking, like, the old saying, like skate where the puck's going. it's always asking, well, what's next? Are we doing this right? Because the worst answer you could, an employee could ever give me if I asked, well, why are we doing? They say, well, this is what we've always done. That's why we do it. It's like, no, there might be a better way to do this. And so, always looking and seeing where the market is going. And so it wasn't a revolution. It was just an evolution. You just have to evolve into the market that we're going after from the investor side,

which is financial advisors, registered investment advisors, which candidly, they're just really, an extension of our old friends and family that have advisors. That's how we kind of evolve. Leadership management and doing, I think leadership and doing in some ways actually competes with itself. And I'll explain that. We talked about alphabet. They famously had this 20% of your time would be tinkering and focused on these skunk work projects, these projects that weren't expected to really go anywhere, but once every decade that, you know, they would have like a new Gmail or something come out of that. One way to think about it is you have a certain amount of time every week and if you are at capacity with doing, if at the end of the week you're always exhausted and

you're always just getting by enough to do the tasks at hand, that time and that effort competes with leadership or thinking about the business. There's this whole paradigm about working in the business versus working on the business. The problem of working on the business is that you can't do it until you've worked in the business. So adding that capacity in your business and giving yourself the quote unquote time to think, when you do your tasks and you have that extra capacity of time, that's when you come up with new ideas. No, but He stops to think, well, why did I have time to think about business? Why do I think about this upbreet or these intervals?

It's because you had that extra time. Some of my biggest breakthroughs are always when I'm being, not doing. And that's when I get that white space just to think. And I think social media, the likes just, as you said, so much doing. When we started for them, I said, we were two guys in a truck. And we were doing everything. I was investor relations. I was HR, not very good at it.

Probably would have fired myself. But I was our CIO, and as you evolve and grow, hopefully you were able to teach and backfill the folks behind you. And you fast forward today, we wouldn't have folks that, you know, came from S&P 500 apartment read or fidelity or some of these household names. You know, if I was still two guys in a truck, we had to continue to scale and build that infrastructure. And as I said earlier, and I never apologized for this. I have tons of empathy for people, but sometimes a company outgrows people. Maybe even me. I would say to my executive team, if I'm not the best leader, put me in my spot.

Like we're very radically transparent with each other. And one of the things that my executive committee told me after our last offsite month and a half ago, we need you to be out focusing more on investments and more white space time. Your ideas, your creativity, don't get me wrong. I go down rabbit holes a lot and hit a dead end and quickly. and I say, okay. And so I try not to distract people in our company with my ideas. I have a place in which to, I call it our product development committee,

in which to air or share those new ideas. I think a lot about how to get better ideas, how do companies get better at implementing new ideas? And I think you have to embrace the fact that companies that build on great ideas have a very low hit rate on new ideas. In other words, new ideas or being very entrepreneurial, being very creative, in essence, is a pursuit that can't have a high hit rate versus maybe managing and scaling incrementally. You could be predictive. You could kind of manage two quarters. But big

ideas by themselves have a low hit rate. But that doesn't mean they can't 10x the business. Can't create orders of magnitude of positive benefits of business. But I think any organization that is able to grow and evolve needs to be able to embrace the low hit rate of great ideas. Yeah, and look, there's the, as we call them our rocks, there are our quarterly rocks. There are our annual company goals that those rocks roll up to. There's our five-year plan. There's our seven-year, and then there's our 10-year. So there's also those be hags, the big, hairy, audacious goals as well.

So what is achievable and in what timeline? I always think there's a way to circumvent, you know, those timelines and 20 years of doing this is shown that there isn't. It just takes time. So making sure that you're not overwhelming yourself with a B-Hag that's not achievable in, you know, this quarter or this year, but you're slowly building to it. So learning patience was huge for me. And then the other thing was learning to be comfortable, being uncomfortable, knowing that it was going to take longer. We couldn't get this done today.

And just accepting that was just a huge, both life and business lesson I've had to learn and that I try and instill my kids today as well. What is the future for him in 10, 20 years from now? I think the next chapter, David, is really about refinement, not reinvention. We want to deepen our expertise in-house and adjacent, you know, sectors within multifamily. Continue to aligning like the right capital and partners and the right with the right strategies and really just maintaining, always maintaining that same discipline that defined us in 2009. Growth is important, but durability is more important. We didn't buy anything in almost five and a half going on six years until this last December.

And just as important to the confidence of our partners is what we didn't do is what we did do. And so again, back to that durability, those folks knowing that we're going to be here in 10, 20 years is just as important as the great returns we put up as well. Double click on that. So you said that you didn't buy anything for five and a half, almost six years. Talk to me about how you instill that patience on an institutional level in order to sit there and not do anything. or not make them incremental investment. I mentioned this earlier. We have a flexible investment mandate.

What I mean by that is on the interval side of our business, we pair both SAS, BCMBS, you know, liquid institutional debt with our private real estate credit. And so we're not just one or the other. And when the market's moving, we can do that. So because we have solutions up and down the capital stack, I was actually, and still am, our largest investor in our open end equity vehicle, just like We didn't have issues in 2008-9.

We didn't have issues over the last few years. So just that determination and really investment acumen not to allocate, going back to your original comment earlier, we were just steadfast. We got better risk-adjusted returns than real estate credit and real estate development. Then real estate development slowed down and we haven't broken ground on something in two years. But we really, really leaned in to our real estate. debt and credit, and now it's coming back whole circle where equity were very bullish on, you know, multifamily fundamentals and taking advantage of opportunities like we did, you know, back in, you know, 2008 to 2012. We're just very disciplined.

People fail to realize this. Supplying demand dynamics in every single asset class. They love to put these labels on assets being good or bad. We talked about office space. Well, a lot of people now think it's bad, but obviously if it goes down enough, there it becomes a risk-adjusted return, this return rate that's available for people that are willing to take risks. And these asset classes go through these cyclical shifts where oftentimes they become hot, and then they become hotter and hotter, and there's foam on, and then there's a bubble, and then they over-crack. Every single asset class outside of treasuries and maybe bonds kind of go through these extreme cycles.

And knowing when to go into an asset class, knowing when to go out of the asset class, and having that flexibility to do that is such an underrated thing. call it the spiky sense or whatever it may be, but that's going back to 2007 where it was just too good to be true. And all of a sudden, everybody had a pulse was getting money to go buy a home and a lot of folks that going into the downturn, everybody was developing. And it was, again, just too good to be true. So having that spiky sense and looking around and being disciplined that when everybody's doing, it's probably time to do something else. And then when nobody's doing, it's probably time to start doing it. And so when you're playing that,

defense. It is very hard to go on offense. And again, what I learned from 08, we didn't have, you know, dedicated funds. But the next time that something was going to happen, I wanted to be ready. So fast forward today, we've got committed vehicles with capital, unlike 08 where we were syndicating. We were only as good as the next deal we could do and how quickly we could take over an asset. We had built that platform to be able to invest up and down the cycle. Didn't know when that was going to happen, meaning when we're the interest. were going to go up. Like, it just something didn't feel right.

Like, everybody was doing value ad and folks that had been getting whacked in the office space or big box retail. Everybody was becoming a seem to multifamily acquire or developer. And they were all quote unquote, IRR driven, doing value ad. And now we're seeing the start of the cleanup of that mess. We're seeing that right now. Whether it's real or not, I won't argue that in private credit. It's been a boom for however many years.

And I think you're seeing that shift out of private credit back into real assets, whether that be real estate or infrastructure or the like. Isn't it during 08, they had the ninja loans, no income, no job, no asset. I remember I say, you got a pulse 985, yeah, you're tempted to you're alive. Okay, here's your loan. And yeah, when when you have your neighbor who's making $60,000 a year, you know, buying four homes, you know one year, you know something's wrong. What is what is one piece of advice you'd give a younger, Darren, that just graduated,

college in 1997, that would have helped you either avoid costly mistakes or helped you accelerate your career. If I had to do it all over, I've learned from my mistakes. So I don't know that I would change anything. What I probably would have done sooner is I would have built the investment management platform earlier. Deal by deal syndicates were necessary at the time they taught me capital formation, investor communications, risk management. But I would have invested in the infrastructure and the talent sooner. I would have spent more money to get the best talent sooner. It would have expedited our growth. That's what I would have done. And I'd remind the younger, Darren, that cycles are in our, we didn't get too high when the times were get too good and we didn't get too low when the times, you know,

were bad. But just staying disciplined long enough, starting earlier and that the heavy lifting will pay off. And that's true. That's true in all investing. and in building a firm. Somewhat obvious, but most things in building any business is downstream of talent. You have the right talent. They will build that monastery for you. Look, a lot of folks say, hey, we'll hire it when we need it. I always, maybe the opposite said, I'm going to spend money to make money.

And so I always invested ahead of the curve, if you will, which some could argue that's the right thing. Some will argue that's the wrong thing. It's worked out well for us spending that money ahead of time with a conviction. knowing that we are building something that's durable and that we will have the investments and profitability to get there. It goes back to what we talked to before.

And if you just have enough to finish what you have that week, your brain is not going to start coming up with new ideas and new things to do. Therefore, you have to bring in the talent proactively in order to complete everything on your plate so that you could start going on to the next task and everything. And there's this philosophical question, how big could a business go?

Well, it's infinite. That's right. Yeah. is I think that the scalability or how big it is just depending on the manpower. It's that theory of constraints, right? Like who's the bottleneck? And AI is a big topic amongst everybody, us as well. Teaching real estate people how to fish, if you will, in AI has been, I would say difficult,

but everybody in this company is embracing it and finding ways each day. The task is, hey, something small. Just see who your thought partner is with AI and how it's going to help make your job a lot more efficient. Yeah, it's the title of one of my favorite books, The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch, where he argues that there is no cap on innovation. Innovation will continue to innovate on itself into infinity. So you better get started. Darren, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast. Looking forward to hanging out in person and continue the conversation.

David, thanks for having me. Really enjoyed the dialogue. Thank you. If you found this conversation valuable, please click follow how I invest. so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.