From Selling Flowers on Street Corners to Building a Billion-Dollar Industrial Real Estate Empire. My Conversation with Brad Cohen, Founder of Cohen Asset Management

Andrew Kirsh (0:00)

Hi, I'm Andrew Kirsh, co-founder of Sklar Kirsh. On this podcast, I interview industry leaders. You'll hear their real-time opinions on today's market, their background, unique career highlights, and guidance for newcomers to the industry. This is The Kirsh Connection.

Welcome to another edition of The Kirsh Connection. I just got finished attending the YPO Roundtable here in Beverly Hills, and it was quite an interesting conference and discussion among 400 YPOers throughout the country. Obviously, everyone in the real estate business is feeling challenges with the rising interest rates, and nobody really knows when the rise will end, how to invest, where to invest. I haven't seen this type of struggle and concern since the summer of 2022 We had a great speaker line up from economist Mohammed El-Iriyan to Mike VK from Eastill, Rick Caruso, Victor Coleman, Sam Nazarian, who I grew up with. It was an all-star cast of speakers, and where we get the most information is really the peer-to-peer conversations to get a real-time feedback of how and what YPOers are feeling and experiencing in today's market. On today's show, I have Brad Cohen, the founder of Cohen Asset Management. I've known Brad for close to 20 years now, and he's built an incredible company specializing in industrial real estate throughout the country. He is really one of the stalwarts in the LA real estate community. Brad gives his perspective on how he started Cohen Asset Management, why he likes the industrial product type, and how he has raised capital both from friends and family and also institutions. It's a really wide-ranging, fantastic conversation with Brad that I hope you will enjoy.

Welcome to another edition of The Kirsh Connection. I am here with Brad Cohen, the founder of Cohen Asset Management, one of the stalwarts of the Los Angeles real estate community. Brad, thank you for coming in to The Kirsh Connection and to my podcast studio. I really appreciate it.

Brad Cohen (2:26)

Andrew, I got to thank you so much for inviting me here today. We've known each other for many years. I think we've been business 15 years.

Your offices are very impressive and you have a beautiful studio here. And I'd love to tell you about Cohen Asset Management. But before we get into that, I want to let you know that coming up will be our 35th year anniversary. We were formally incorporated in 1992 So I'm very proud of that. Although we go back a little further, which I'll tell you a little bit about.

Andrew Kirsh (2:58)

1992, I remember meeting you, I want to say 2009, 2010 I just left Big Law, I met Andrew Raines, and it was really just great getting to know you, working with you, a lot of fun, a lot of learning, a lot of excitement, deal flow, and I can't wait for my audience to hear about your background and all about Cohen Asset Management. But let's start at the top, let's talk to the extent my audience may not know Cohen Asset Management, what do you guys do?

Brad Cohen (3:34)

So Cohen Asset Management is a private real estate investment firm with a singular focus of the industrial logistics sector. That's all we do, that's all we've ever done. And we trace our roots back 45 to 50 years ago when I founded the company, although only formally incorporated in 1992

And took a lot of baby steps along the way, started in Los Angeles and kind of created a company that now is nationwide with four offices. We have an office in Century City, we have an office in Phoenix, we have an office in Dallas, we have an office in Northern New Jersey, fully staffed offices. And today we have approximately $4 billion of assets under management.

And I would say that we have a phenomenal bench of key team members. And we built out several executives that have executive leadership and capabilities within our company. And our, our equity is really divided up into 60% high net worth, some ultra high net worth investors, as well as 40% institutional investors. And our debt is fairly low leverage, average is probably 40% and is 100% with insurance companies. But we're really focused on the industrial and just the sector. We've gotten very good over the years. We've had probably 65 to 70 million square feet of transactions over that time period, over 600 transactions over the past 35 years, which have all been documented. We have a track record for the entire amount. So we have, we have a lot of history under our belt.

Andrew Kirsh (5:22)

Yeah. You know, they used, they would say that industrial, not sexy, but just makes money. And today, my capital clients and contacts want more exposure to industrial than any other asset class. Have you seen in their, what, 40-ish years or 35 years? Oh, you just had your 35th anniversary.