SCALE CEO Leadership Series Vol. 24

My company is Echo Real Estate Capital. We were formed in 2016 and we are based here in Chicago. We have an acquisitions
and development platform. Within healthcare real estate, we primarily focus on three different types of deals. The first being traditional value add deals, where there is an asset and, for some reason, value is not being maximized. That could be because they don’t have a great leasing team in place. It could be
because the current owner doesn’t have the financing to make capital improvements to a building. They are having a hard time attracting tenants for that reason, because the asset needs a new roof and a new parking lot. Or maybe the current owner is a group of physicians, and they’re not really paying attention to the asset, because they’re so focused on their operations that the last 15 to 20% of the building is just sort of sitting there because
no one is actively working on it. Or maybe we have a tenant that’s leading us to a deal, and they want us to acquire a building because they’re going to occupy some vacancy in it. That’s what we would call value-add deals. The second type of healthcare real estate would be just ground-up new construction. We speculatively take land positions, or we will work in partnership with larger private physician groups or health systems to identify
sites and needs for their space programming. We then work with them to create a medical office building, either single or multi-tenant, for their expansion needs or consolidation needs, whichever the case is. Then the third thing that we do is sort of programmatic, what we call de novo rollouts typically for private equity backed healthcare provider groups. These can be groups like autism, therapy, urgent care, dental, dermatology, behavioral
health, addiction treatment. These are more programmatic, smaller but volume engagements with a tenant. As their development partner, we help them expand and scale. My background really comes on the retail side, both in retail landlord and tenant rep brokerage, as well as development.
I’ve worked with a number of national retailers in a previous life on the brokerage side – household names like Verizon Wireless, Dollar General, McDonald’s, Sonic. There are some larger junior anchor department stores that I represented over my career. I also worked at family office development firms, but they were primarily retail development firms, doing power center and grocery anchor development primarily here in Chicago.
And now with Echo Real Estate Capital. Again, while Echo is based here in Chicago, we have a national reach, and are currently working on assets from Arizona to Boston, and everywhere in between. We’ve carved out a niche for ourselves in that we will pursue opportunities in markets that are perhaps under the radar of larger groups. As examples, we’ve transacted and acquired medical office buildings in Topeka, Kansas, or Akron, Ohio, Rowlett,
Texas, smaller towns in Indiana. That’s a niche where we’ve found opportunities where others are maybe not necessarily looking, either because of geography or size of the deal.