Amy Price, Sonny Kalsi and John Carrafiell.
Amy Price, Sonny Kalsi and John Carrafiell
President; co-CEOs at BGO
Last year's rank: 48
In this prolonged period of market volatility, BGO has positioned itself for an uncertain future with a heavy investment in data science analytics.
BGO (formerly BentallGreenOak) has utilized analytics to determine that its best path to success involves homing in on infrastructure-oriented assets, including logistics, data center and cold-storage properties in markets poised for rental growth.
“We think there’s going to be enormous bifurcation in markets that have rental growth going forward and markets that don’t, and the only way in our judgment to understand those trends is through analyzing demographics and other structural market data, so that’s where we really invested heavily,” said John Carrafiell. “We’ve been doing it for four years, but we doubled down last year because it’s clear to us that that’s going to be the difference between achieving top quartile performance and not over the next five to 10 years.”
BGO’s heavy focus on infrastructure real estate during the past year included launching the non-traded BGO Industrial Real Estate Income Trust. The offering, which was described as a “pure play” industrial REIT, invests primarily in “stabilized income-oriented industrial warehouse and logistics properties” in markets with “moderate to high barriers for entry near large or growing population centers with access to blue-collar workers.”
The firm, led by Carrafiell, Sonny Kalsi and Amy Price, has aggressively expanded its data science platform with a new proprietary model that then uses analytics on a forward-looking basis to determine how markets will perform. The latest version of the model is up to 80 percent accurate compared with 40 percent at launch, which has been aided by increased use of artificial intelligence tools.
“We tore up the playbook on how to do research in real estate,” Carrafiell said. “It’s feet on the ground, pound the pavement, old school real estate judgment, but now we marry it with fact-based, data-based, back-tested analytics that now have a predictive power of upward of 80 percent.”
