Peter C. Lewis Featured Speaker at the New York City Family Office 2018 Outlook Forum

 
New York — Peter C. Lewis, Founder and Chairman of Wharton Equity Partners, was the featured speaker at a family office conference held on December 12 at the law offices of Baker Hostetler located in Rockefeller Center.

Mr. Lewis’s presentation centered on his view on where real estate is headed in 2018 and beyond. He has spent a 30-year career observing trends and acting on these observations in selecting strategies for Wharton Equity to pursue. “Since founding Wharton Equity in 1987, we have chosen an investment approach which is agnostic to asset types or strategies. What governs where we invest is related to where we think things are going, rather than where they currently are,” notes Mr. Lewis.

For instance, capitalizing on the surge in e-commerce, the firm recently launched Wharton Industrial, a platform focused on the development of big box warehouses, as well as the acquisition of last-miles properties. The firm’s initial transaction is the development of a 1 million square foot warehouse/distribution facility located in Atlanta, GA. Additionally, in 2012, while others were targeting the primary markets for the acquisition of multifamily properties, Wharton Equity pursued secondary markets such as Savannah, Nashville and Charlotte, and acquired over $400 million of properties since that time. Finally, Wharton Equity was an early investor in self-storage amassing nearly 10,000 units before selling the properties to a public REIT and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance.

“It has been one of the great joys of my career to have the freedom to pursue strategies that were pioneering at the time, and proved to be prescient in hindsight,” Mr. Lewis adds. “While there is obviously concern that the markets are getting over-heated, we see an enormous amount of opportunity in picking big themes to invest in, and letting time marinate our thesis.”

Wharton Equity Partners, formed in 1987 and with offices in New York City and Miami, is a diversified real estate sponsor with deep hands-on operating experience across various real estate assets and strategies. The firm serves as a holding company for a suite of real estate businesses, including Wharton Residential, Wharton Industrial, Wharton Hospitality and Wharton Urban, and has been involved with well in excess of $1 billion in transactions since inception.