Tower Capital and Financing The Real Estate Business
Adam is the Founding Partner and Principal at Tower Capital, a Phoenix-based Commercial Real Estate Finance firm. Since 2015, the firm has been involved in over $500 million in successful debt and equity placements on behalf of investors across all major asset classes.
Adam is an active member of Forbes Real Estate Council and has been featured and published in numerous national and industry publications including Forbes, Globestreet.com, National Real Estate Investor, Phoenix Business Journal, Commercial Executive Magazine, Multi-Housing News, and many others.
Podcast Highlights
- Who is Adam Finkel?
Adam is a regular guy from Boston, Massachusetts. When he turned 18 he headed out west and went to school at Arizona State University. It was there where he found an opportunity to get his foot in the door of doing commercial real estate from some of the older members of his fraternity. Prior to that Adam didn’t have any experience in the industry, he just saw the opportunity that was available and went for it.
Doing the transactional deals and putting in the work gave Adam a good understanding of what tenants and landlords need, and that served him well once he moved onto the finance side of the business.
Investing in real estate doesn’t need a college degree, anyone can do it, which is the great thing about. Adam recommends that people start small since it’s more attainable and makes financing larger deals much easier. The first question Adam gets asked is “who is the sponsor?” because that’s even more important about the details of the deal itself.
- Getting Started In Real Estate
Many people get their feet wet in the real estate business by buying single family homes. That’s where Adam tells people to get started in real estate. From there it’s possible and easier to move onto multi family homes, apartments, or commercial real estate.
For some people, they have to learn from personal experience and make those mistakes. For those people they usually find that it can be very challenging trying to buy a larger building and they end up starting off small anyway.
When Adam was getting into the real estate business in 2003 the market was picking back up again and there was a lot of activity in his local market. He believed that there was no better way to build wealth than real estate so it seemed like the perfect opportunity.
Adam loves working with people and finds the capital markets very exciting. There are so many facets to commercial and traditional real estate so there is tremendous potential for people to tap into. With most things in life, it takes exposure to many different things to find out what you like and don’t like. If an opportunity comes along you should try it out and see where it leads you.
- Tower Capital and The Finance Side of the Business
Adam wasn’t particularly interested in getting into the financial side of things. After working for a few years he began to get tired of the tenant rep leasing side of the business. He met a man named Neil Churney who invited him to work with Johnson Capital as an analyst helping Neil with the finance side.