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| Rick Imperiale and Dr. David Krause |
Rick
Imperiale, the President & Chief Investment Officer of Uniplan, again made
his annual visit to the AIM classroom on Wednesday, 11/9/16 and talked about
his firm’s approach to REIT and micro-cap investing. On the day after the
national elections, he also talked about the impact of the proposed policies of
the President-elect, Donald Trump. The
AIM students and Rick had a lively conversation.
Mr.
Imperiale founded Uniplan in 1984 and has been the lead portfolio manager for
the Uniplan REIT Strategy since its launch in 1988. He started investing in
REITs in 1984 and with more than 30 years in financial services, Rick is one of
the most experienced investors in alternative asset strategies. In 1999 he
founded the Uniplan Micro Cap fund – which invests primarily in companies with
market capitalizations under $500 million. It has a ‘value with catalyst’ focus
concentrating on stocks with low relative P/E ratios; low relative
price-to-free cash flows; and low leverage relative to peers.
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| Rick Imperiale |
His
presentation on REITs was very timely as the AIM Fund is considering adding a
local real estate healthcare firm, Physicians Realty Trust (ticker: DOC) on
Friday. He knows the firm and was able to talk about the properties they lease
to physicians, hospitals and healthcare delivery systems. Rick talked about
their diverse portfolio of medical properties, including medical office
buildings, outpatient treatment centers and hospitals.
After
graduating from Marquette University, Rick got his start in financial services
as a Credit Analyst at First Wisconsin Bank in 1980. The credit scoring models
he built for evaluating companies still serve as the basis for some of the
quantitative models Uniplan uses today. In 1982, Rick moved to Ziegler, an
investment bank, where he served as a Corporate Analyst. Initially, his focus
was on financial models that would help project how changes to specific
variables would be likely to influence a company’s income statement and balance
sheet.
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| Rick Imperiale and Nick Christman |
Rick was
asked to join a new project at the investment bank involving the creation and
management of a hedged municipal bond fund. While he was managing the fund,
Rick developed his formative ideas for measuring relative values of securities
based on spreads. The REIT Strategy was the first of three alternative asset
strategies that Rick has successfully managed at Uniplan. Over the course of
his career, he has been a pioneer in the analysis of alternative asset classes
and authored two books on the topic, including Real Estate Investment
Trusts: New Strategies for Portfolio Management. He is also the author of
Author of The Micro Cap Investor: Strategies for Making Big Returns in
Small Companies. He leads a team of 9 investment professionals with more
than 150 years of total investment experience.
