The Platform CEO
Building the Real Estate Firm That Runs Without You
Why does a buyer pay twelve times one real estate firm’s fee earnings and two or three times another’s? This book answers that question through the story of one Sun Belt apartment sponsor and the eighteen months it takes to become a firm that runs without its founder.
The full working draft is free to read here while the book is prepared for print. Foreword by Joel Heikenfeld.
“The clearest blueprint I’ve seen for turning a real estate firm into an institution that compounds. Read carefully. The lessons in this book are second to none.”
The whole book fits in one line
Keep it with you from the first page to the last. Each part of it is something you can move.
What your firm is worth = recurring fee earnings × the multiple a buyer will pay × (1 − the founder discount)
What recurs
Recurring fee earnings
What the firm earns whether or not it closes a deal this year.
What a buyer will pay for it
The multiple
How confident a buyer is that those earnings will keep coming. Fees that keep arriving and a written way of deciding raise it.
What walks out with you
The founder discount
How much of it a buyer expects to walk out the door with you. Judgment on paper and a named successor shrink it.
Underneath sit two moats. The moat of people keeps the value in the founder and a few busy heads, and it leaves when they do. The moat of platform keeps it in the process and the record, and it stays when they go. Read Before the Story
One firm, one rung at a time
Andy Daryani and his partner Greg started Service Capital at a card table in a spare bedroom. Twelve years later it has twenty-two people in Bee Cave, Texas, three funds of value-add apartments across the Sun Belt, and a fourth fund in the market.
Then a family office offers to anchor Fund IV, if the firm can open a data room in sixteen days. On the flight home Andy starts a list on a legal pad, and he cannot answer item four without calling someone who is fishing in Cabo.
The book follows the firm through the next eighteen months as it moves each part of the line, until it can answer a second diligence without him and run for two weeks while he is away. A short note from the author closes every chapter.
Andy Daryani had a window seat and a legal pad he had not written on since Aspen. The family office would put fifty million into Fund IV if the firm cleared their diligence team, and the diligence team wanted a data room by the fifteenth. He had agreed to that over dinner, and he had meant it.
Somewhere over Amarillo he started the list. He wrote down twelve years of IC memos and the Fund II waterfall, the version with the reserve amendment. Then he reached item four. Item four lived in Scott’s head, and Scott was fishing in Cabo until Thursday.
Keep reading Chapter 1Contents
Four parts, thirteen chapters and a coda, set between September 2026 and July 2031.
Part One: The Firm That Runs on Andy
September to December 2026
Also in the book: Foreword, Before the Story, Coda: The Decade Ahead, The Whole Picture, Afterword, Fifteen Principles and Endnotes.
About the author
Chirag “Chi” Hathiramani has about twenty years of principal-side experience in commercial real estate and about $3 billion of institutional transactions. His career includes Vornado Realty Trust, Aspen Heights Partners and Casoro Group, with experience as a CIO. He was named to the GlobeSt. 50 Under 40 in 2020, and he is an advisor to a real estate investment firm in Austin.
The author’s proceeds from this book go to the School of Business and Technology at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, where he teaches and serves on the advisory board.
Get the book when it ships
The print edition is in production. Leave your email and you will get one message when the book can be ordered.