Richard Schaupp

Richard Schaupp has spent nearly all of his professional career at Clarion Partners, where he began working in 2000 right out of business school.

He’s also had a hand in almost every aspect of the business, including asset management, special servicing, debt restructuring and development. But, most notably, Schaupp’s work in Clarion’s portfolio management business helped turn the firm into one of the largest industrial real estate managers in the U.S. today.

Schaupp has been a managing director and portfolio manager at Clarion for over a decade now, and is responsible for the acquisition, asset management and development of more than $4 billion worth of real estate. He also had a big part in Clarion’s merger with asset manager Franklin Templeton in 2020, when Franklin Templeton completed its acquisition of Legg Mason. (Clarion was formerly a subsidiary of Legg Mason.)

“I’ve been focusing on those products ever since,” Schaupp said. “I spend a fair amount of time not only managing the real estate, but also thinking about how to provide access to a broader group of investors and working closely with Franklin Templeton on that.”

Over the past year, Schaupp has grown the Clarion Partners Real Estate Income Fund (CPREX) to almost $2 billion of gross asset value. That fund has recently focused largely on health care — including senior housing and medical offices — as “the number of baby boomers getting older and the spend behind them” continues to be “powerful,” Schaupp said.

And, of course, Clarion is still sticking with what it knows best: industrial outdoor storage properties and traditional warehouses. In March, Clarion, along with Cadence Partners, sold a newly completed, 98,860-square-foot distribution warehouse in Hollywood, Fla., for $38.3 million.

“Those are the sectors we really focused on this year, and we built those up significantly in the portfolio over the last 12 months,” Schaupp said. “Those have been really exciting investments to work on and to see them executed and start to perform for the investors in the fund.”

Clarion also experimented with retail this year, acquiring a 156,568-square-foot grocery-anchored shopping center in Norwalk, Conn., in July. The property is fully leased to anchors including Stop & Shop and Hobby Lobby.

As for the coming year, Schaupp is optimistic the industry will recover following what he called an “adjustment period,” especially as artificial intelligence and tech spending become omnipresent in the industry.