Joseph Bramante
Chief executive Officer
TriArc Properties

As CEO of TriArc Real Estate Partners, the best part of Joseph Bramante’s day is showing investors how to create more time to enjoy life by building passive income streams which can fund unpaid vacations and accelerate retirement. The metric by which he measures his success is the number of people he’s helped achieve early retirement.

Joseph came from a family of modest means, but with academic scholarships, student loans, and income earned as a tow boat deckhand during summer and holiday breaks, he managed to put himself through college. He graduated Cum Laude from Louisiana Tech University with a bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering. After college, Joseph was a business team lead at ExxonMobil on the company’s highest profile project where he managed cost for $1B in material logistics, housing, and infrastructure contracts for the over $22B initiative. He received the Project Recognition Award for exceptional performance in two consecutive years, and while highly paid, he never had time to enjoy the financial rewards of the job. He worked 60+ hours a week, as did all his managers, and he could see the wear and tear on their faces. Vacation seemed an unattainable goal although he could certainly afford one.

He landed in the multifamily real estate industry by accident. ExxonMobil transferred Joseph from Houston to Papua New Guinea where his project was based. Living in a compound with his managers and little to do besides work, he learned many of them were investing in real estate. It was 2010, just two years after the US housing market collapsed, and foreclosures were everywhere. Joseph’s interest was piqued. With a 4.0 college GPA in mathematics, he had always been a numbers guy. He developed a spreadsheet and estimated he would need a loan for $3M to buy 80 rental houses over a two-year period. Bank after bank laughed as he tried to secure a loan from the other side of the world to finance the acquisitions, but one lender said, “Why don’t you buy an 80-unit apartment complex instead?” Joseph knew nothing about multifamily real estate, so to learn, he read numerous best sellers on multifamily investing. The potential to rapidly increase a property’s value independent of its neighbors was attractive, and in 2011, he purchased his first multifamily property, sight unseen, while still living in Papua New Guinea. It was supposed to be a private investment, but it morphed into a business.

Six months later, he was back in Houston with his property at 25% vacancy and four units under renovation when he was notified the insurance he’d purchased was a scam, his property had asbestos, and his job at ExxonMobil was being eliminated. The next day, he paid for a membership at a local real estate education club where he met his partners, Carrie Breneman and Deborah Newsome. The club advised Joseph to sell his property and take a loss. Instead, he and his partners leased it down to zero, executed a massive $30k/unit renovation, and then leased it back up. It was the most stressful nine months of Joseph’s life, but it was the right decision, as it paid out over a 200% return. In 2013, they partnered and acquired three more multifamily properties, spent $5K to $30k per unit on renovations, and increased net operating income (NOI) across all by over 80%. In 2016, they rebranded under the name TriArc, establishing the foundation on which to build a wholly integrated multifamily investment company with the goal of acquiring over 20,000 units in the next 10 years.

Joseph loves working with the amazing TriArc team to breathe new life into flailing communities. He’s a member of CCIM, Entrepreneur Organization, Rotary, Houston Apartment Association, and the Urban Land Institute.

Growing up in a single-parent household with a mom struggling to support the family as a waitress, Joseph was no stranger to low-income housing. His family moved from apartment to apartment throughout southern Louisiana, and Joseph counts it a miracle he survived childhood given the safety issues in the run-down properties where he once lived. By providing affordable housing that’s clean, safe, and well-maintained while helping investors grow their wealth, Joseph is helping to improve the circumstances of people from all walks of life.