Riaz Capital’s roots go back two generations. Founder Riaz Taplin’s father was among a handful of entrepreneurs in the late 1970s who started the business of adding value to San Francisco buildings by converting them to condominiums. Riaz learned from his father the importance of creating value by mastering a niche that has strong demand, as it remains protected from market fluctuations.

A period of prosperity in the 1980s for the family business was bookended by two devastating black swan events: the high inflation and interest rates of the early 1980s, and the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which was immediately followed by the recession of 1990-91. Several years later, after Riaz sold his first ‘flipper’ in Burlingame (at the age 16), another shock — this time the Asian financial crisis of 1998 — upended his hopes of profiting from the transaction. These black swan events, and others in the decades ahead, were instrumental in shaping Riaz’s approach to risk management.

Entry into Multifamily Housing

Starting in 1998, the Taplin family began acquiring and managing a portfolio of multifamily properties — i.e., workforce housing — in Oakland. The dotcom bust of the early 2000s dented the business without seriously damaging it — a consequence of steady passive income from a diversified portfolio of a hundred units. The contrast with the zero-profit Burlingame flipper was stark. Looking back, Riaz muses, “Having a source of passive cash-flow became an anchor in my understanding of how to build a stable portfolio of assets”.

The Hard Grind of the Luxury Years

After graduating from the London School of Economics in 2003, Riaz established his own firm developing high-end residences in San Francisco. As a one-man operation, these years forced Riaz to learn every dimension of the business. He was multiple departments - design, permitting, financing, construction management and sales - all rolled into one. Armed with nothing more than a cell phone, a dump truck and his morning latte, he grew this solo operation to ~$20 million in sales by 2006.

These three years proved to be Riaz’s proverbial 10,000 hours. By age 25, Riaz had built a reputation for high-end luxury with a contemporary aesthetic. Riaz says of this period, “I learned how to optimize time, cost and quality. Regardless of people telling me I could only have two out of the three, I always insisted on all three."

A (Financial) Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Riaz’s focus on the luxury end of real estate came to an abrupt end during the financial crisis of 2008. Riaz was lucky to sell his last luxury home fifteen days before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, after it sat on the market for what felt like the longest two months of his life. This cliffhanger resurrected the ghosts of the Burlingame flipper, and once again exposed the flaws of overdependence on a single asset or transaction.

This latest black-swan event brought home the importance of cycle-resistant investments with strong cash flows. Riaz took to heart the lesson that economic cycles are a reality and often triggered by black-swan events. In Riaz’s words,
"There’s nothing more unsafe than a perfectly safe environment."

This period of devastation presented opportunities as well. Cratered real-estate values and the prevalent fear in the real-estate market led Riaz to strike lease option deals on under-valued properties. The subsequent, and highly profitable, purchase-and-sales were a lesson in the importance of business fundamentals over group-think and emotion.

Luxury Meets Multi-family

In 2011, the demand-supply gap in affordable housing for the Bay Area’s middle-income workforce led to Riaz’s epiphany about micro-units as a solution to the crisis. This solution brought together his experience in luxury and workforce-multifamily in the form of high quality units at an affordable price. This was the final impetus for Riaz to exit the luxury market to focus on workforce housing.

The business grew in scale - from 80 to 800 tenants in the six years to 2016 and with 945 units being transacted between 2014 and 2016. The Riaz Capital team developed its strategy of converting local jewels into stylish yet affordable residences. This strategy of adaptive reuse was built on developing the capability and relationships to move opportunistically and quickly, with financing available on tap, whenever a desirable property became available for purchase.

This was also a period of evolution. With Zen-like focus, the team at Riaz Capital accumulated valuable insights through a build-operate-learn-iterate process on multiple housing solutions for the urban workforce including historic micros, student housing, co-living, micro-studios, and conventional multifamily before arriving at our current model of micro-living.

Riaz Capital Today

When the latest black-swan event hit in the form of Covid-19, our resilient model helped us weather the ensuing changes in the real estate market more effectively than our competitors, with 95% average occupancy between April 2020 and April 2021.

Today, Riaz Capital has 3,600 units under management and development, with a $750+ million real-estate asset base.

How We Build Value

Innovative design lies at the heart of our value creation process, allowing for a high degree of standardization and resulting efficiencies in both construction and management of properties.

Housing for the budget-conscious raises visions of bare-bones functionality with little emotional appeal. But with our roots in luxury and our deep understanding of the urban workforce segment, we incorporate style and aesthetics for this resident using high quality materials and products, and provide all the features in a prospective resident’s mental checklist while eliminating unnecessary bells and whistles.

Our per-residence construction costs are less than half of the Bay Area average, allowing us to offer units at 25% lower rents than competing properties, while including several amenities for free. Our buildings are situated at convenient locations near urban amenities and transit, reducing the need for costly and unproductive parking spaces.

Doing Well, while Doing Good

The Bay Area’s housing shortfall continues to be at crisis levels. At Riaz Capital, we are doing our part by providing premium quality, yet affordable housing units for moderate-income professionals.

With transit, walk and bike scores for our newer buildings that are 50 to 80% higher than the national urban average, wood-frame construction as opposed to concrete, and 100% electric versus gas buildings, we lower the carbon footprint of our developments. Doing good for our residents, the neighbouring community and the planet while doing well for our investors is part of our ethos.

Central to achieving our vision of quality affordable housing for the Bay Area urban workforce is a driven and dedicated team of over fifty highly skilled real estate professionals, each bringing varied expertise to the table and working under the leadership of an executive team with decades of real estate experience.