CPI Blog

Most Powerful Women of Real Estate Private Equity – Syndications

by | Dec 15, 2022

Dear valued investors and future investors,

Another week has slipped by, and it’s time yet again for CPI Capital’s weekly news briefing. This usually contains a mixture of updates, commentary and informative articles about the lucrative world of passive real estate investment.

However, this week we wanted to do something slightly different and take a look at three of the most powerful women in private equity real estate (syndications) investment, namely our very own Ava Benesocky of CPI Capital, Janet LePage of Western Wealth Capital and Jilliene Helman of Realty Mogul.

But first, if you are already a subscriber to our newsletter, thank you. If you are not, why not sign up now and keep right up to date with all you need to know about syndicated real estate investment?

CPI Capital, Western Wealth Capital and Realty Mogul

There are some definite similarities between CPI Capital, Western Wealth Capital and Realty Mogul—they are all well-known, successful investors in the multifamily and/or BTR-SFR syndicated private equity investment space, and all have powerful, influential women as their founders/co-founder and leaders.

Successful REPE investment can be challenging at the best of times, so we thought we’d take a snapshot of the three ladies heading up CPI Capital, Western Wealth Capital and Realty Mogul to see if we can glean some of the secrets of their success.

Ava Benesocky of CPI Capital

Ava worked her way up from an early age, without the benefit of any familial financial backing, but with the benefit of hard-working, highly principled parents from an accounting background, who believed that hard work, yet with compassion, always pays off.

A relative newcomer to the private equity syndication investment space, Ava and her team have already closed on three deals across the US, and have a fourth property under contract.

Although Ava now helps busy professionals earn passive income through multifamily or BTR-SFR real estate investments, she started her real estate career as an realtor/agent, becoming one of the youngest award-winning agents at REMAX.

Fearless and ready to create her own story, she moved to Vancouver, where she built a strong network of real estate investors and has become unstoppable in her drive and determination to succeed, using her “street smarts” to make it in this challenging business. She has continued to learn and grow with resilience and consistently seeks further knowledge about real estate investments.

Once working on the investment side of the industry, Ava quickly realised why many people hesitated to become real estate investors, particularly in large metropolitan cities in Canada and the US. She saw that the disproportionate ratio between median home price and median income, priced out many potential investors from becoming homeowners, quite apart from building a real estate investment portfolio.

Having identified the pain points many investors have when looking to passively invest in real estate, Ava pivoted her focus to real estate private equity…. and the rest is history!

Apart from being the CEO of CPI Capital, Ava is also an author, public speaker, educator and has been featured in publications such as Forbes, Yahoo Finance and numerous YouTube based videos and podcasts.

Janet LePage of Western Wealth Capital

Janet has been in the real estate industry since 2008, having spent the previous eight years
as senior marketing manager at a major North American construction company. Her hands-on experience with corporate structure and controls provided a solid foundation to build her own business. Accordingly, over the last 14 years, Janet has built Western Wealth Capital into a global equity platform for real estate investment.

With more than $2.5 billion in transaction value, the Vancouver-based company is the eighth largest private foreign buyer of US multifamily real estate.

Janet started by buying “fixer-uppers” but, as margins condensed, shifted her investment strategy and bought her first apartment building at auction, a 23-unit property near the University of Arizona. A year later, Janet purchased a 200-unit building for $5-million in Phoenix which dramatically moved forward her career in real estate investment.

Western Wealth has created a strategy in which undertaking tasks the same way every time enables scalability. For example, once a property is purchased, a series of uniform interior and exterior upgrades are carried out and this shortens the timeline for renovations and speeds up the process of listing units on the rental market. Also, attention to detail and being able to add value by providing items in demand by occupiers, has helped Western Wealth reduce risks and create wealth for investors.

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As CEO and co-founder of Western Wealth, Janet has gained national recognition and accolades, including winning a variety of awards, and has created a responsive business that can adapt to changing market environments and leverage opportunities for continued growth.

Janet has grown her precise business strategy from more than 50 residential transactions in Arizona to the purchase of 110+ multifamily buildings with over 27,000 rental units countrywide. Western Wealth Capital currently has over 40 staff across its Vancouver and Tempe headquarters, 50 in-house property management and some 400 employees.

Jilliene Helman of Realty Mogul

After graduation, Jilliene started in banking and had the opportunity to get exposure to many different aspects of the banking world, including wealth management, finance and strategy. She quickly realised that many of the wealthy clients she was handling in wealth management had made their money in real estate.

In 2013, she co-founded RealtyMogul.com and, today, the company is a thriving platform, being the leading online, crowdfunding destination within the real estate industry.

A core funding strategy of Realty Mogul is to seek investors that not only have capital, but can also bring value to a deal, whether it’s in technology, real estate or FinTech.

Jilliene has stated that a core mission at RealtyMogul.com is “Access through Innovation”, with that value proposition to both sides of the market being built upon such core purpose. It also aims to simplify real estate investing by connecting real estate entrepreneurs and investors through cutting-edge technology.

Realty Mogul’s online platform connects borrowers and sponsors who are seeking to raise capital to retail and institutional investors to facilitate equity and debt transactions, effectively providing a “one-stop shop” for commercial real estate financing. Such borrowers and sponsors can access a network of institutional and retail investors they may not have been able to reach, saving them time and resources. Realty Mogul handles all ongoing operating and tax reporting, distributions and relationships.

Investors use the Realty Mogul platform to gain access to real estate investments nationwide as it is a fast, efficient and transparent platform, offering competitive pricing due to its cost structure. It saves investors time and resources, offering convenient online presentations of full due diligence packages.

CPI Capital, Western Wealth and Realty Mogul are all innovative and exciting (relatively) new private equity real estate syndication companies at the leading edge of passive investment in multifamily and/or BTR-SFR projects across the US.

Despite the troubling fact that only around 3% of all major companies in the syndication real estate investment space are headed by women, with the founders/co-founders of CPI Capital, Western Wealth and Realty Mogul all being female and leading the way, this percentage is surely set to increase in the near future!

Yours sincerely,
August Biniaz
COO, Co-Founder CPI Capital

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