Leadership

Brian Donahue - Principal and Founder

Brian leads the investments and operations of Aperture, bringing 17 years of principal investment and 11 years of institutional commercial real estate experience. He has closed $2.7 billion in real estate acquisitions, developments (including land entitlement), and workouts, including 2,000 apartment units.

Before founding Aperture, Brian was Director of Multifamily Acquisitions at Virtus Real Estate Capital, a real estate private equity firm with $3 billion in real estate. He helped direct the multifamily investment strategy and sourced, underwrote and executed multifamily, build-to-rent, and manufactured housing acquisitions and developments nationwide.

Prior to Virtus, Brian was Vice President of Acquisitions at Clarion Partners, a leading institutional real estate investment manager with $70 billion of real estate. He was responsible for sourcing, underwriting and executing acquisitions and developments for multifamily, retail, industrial, office and manufactured housing in the western region. During his six-year tenure Clarion’s flagship fund ranked in the top 10% or 25% for investment performance versus its NCREIF index competitors, while the firm tripled, and the fund doubled its assets under management.

Prior to Clarion, he was an Asset Manager at Colony Capital, an opportunistic real estate private equity firm managing $46 billion. Brian led workouts, restructuring, repositioning, and disposition for portfolios of distressed commercial real estate nationwide across all product types.

He has also worked at a multi-strategy hedge fund, Shinnecock Partners, and navigated the GFC as a discretionary equities trader at Assent LLC, one of the leading proprietary trading firms in the country.

Brian received an M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he was a Student Investment Fund Fellow, and a Bachelor of Arts from Lewis and Clark College.