Austin’s Ari Rastegar Seeks To Help Shape His Hometown’s Growth

Hundreds of thousands of new residents picked up their bags to move to Austin, Texas, over the past decade, making the once-sleepy college town one of the nation’s top real estate markets. But this economic development success has also resulted in clogged highways and new demand that’s pushed up housing prices.

Ari Rastegar, founder and CEO of investment and development firm Rastegar Property Co., wants to try to help smooth things out. He touts his firm as Austin’s most active locally based commercial real estate developer, excluding multifamily property.

His firm, Rastegar said, has benefited from an advantage because he, as someone born and raised in the city, knows Austin. Moreover, his homegrown firm has been operating in Austin since 2015, before the latest boom in the Texas capital that’s included development by major companies such as iPhone maker Apple and electric car builder Tesla.

“We want to be a support system. As people come and move into Austin who are transient, we want to be there to support them with housing and apartments,” Rastegar told CoStar News in an interview. “As new companies relocate here, we want to support them with office. As supply logistics companies [arrive here], we want to support them with industrial.”

But with fast growth comes growing pains. Housing and affordability will be an issue for the city as it continues to grow, Rastegar said.

“We’re really here helping facilitate what the growth of the city is,” Rastegar continued. “As people begin to come and companies begin to come, as commerce is transacted, we want to be the nexus point between those two things, to help foster better, smoother growth.”

His firm has been active the past few months in Austin with real estate deals and plans to build housing, office space, schools and warehouses. Rastegar told CoStar News he’s on the verge of signing a multibillion-dollar land deal — details of which he can’t share yet — for a development in the Texas capital.

Only four other companies are more active in Austin’s office and industrial real estate space: Houston’s Alliance Industrial Co., Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co., Titan Development of Albuquerque and Los Angeles-based Karlin Real Estate.

Rastegar has 621,000 square feet of projects under development right now. The largest project under construction is Infinity Park, a warehouse and distribution development that would bring 596,000 square feet of industrial space online when completed, according to CoStar research.

Austin “is one of the leading pillars of the United States,” Rastegar said. “Austin is the new San Francisco. We are aiding and cheering along with the growth of Austin. Austin has its own identity. It’s my hometown that I love very dearly.”

Rastegar’s company has invested in 38 cities, 12 states and seven asset classes. The company is headquartered in Austin and has satellite operations in New York City and Miami. The developer’s roots as a real estate deal-maker can be traced back to his days as a teenager.

Rastegar said he was inspired to pursue a career in real estate by his grandfather, who won gold medals in Iranian track and field competitions, earned a medical degree and worked as a psychiatrist.

“My grandfather came to America from Iran after the Iranian Revolution that took place in 1979. We spent a tremendous amount of time together,” Rastegar said. “I remember going through downtown Dallas one time, and we were talking about different things we want to do for my career. It was not a strange conversation to be having with my grandfather, who was always planning my future. I told him I wanted to be a doctor, like he was.”

Rastegar’s grandfather, however, pushed back on his teenage grandson.

“He gave me this disgruntled look and shook his head. He said, ‘No, you’re in America, and America is the land of opportunity,’” Rastegar recalled. “He pointed to one of these buildings … and said, ‘You need to buy five buildings like this.’”

It would take Rastegar a few more years to officially get into the real estate business. Rastegar grew up in Texas and worked odd jobs and saved up as much money as he could. One of those jobs was flipping burgers and waiting on customers at Johnny Rockets. He also delivered pizzas. He saved enough money to buy his first car.

“We didn’t have much growing up, but to say that we really went without things would not be true, either. Both my mother and my father, my stepfather and my stepmother, went through excruciating links to make sure we always had the necessities,” Rastegar said. “We were aware that we were poor, but being in America, growing up in America, it’s hard to say that our life was some tragedy.”

He added that “early on, I exercised an entrepreneurial outlook on life,” Rastegar said. “Whether that was going to buy candy from Sam’s and selling it at school for a profit, or selling and trading baseball cards, I was always deal-making.”

The deal-making and money-saving lifestyle set him up for his first real estate transaction in the mid-2000s while he was a law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Rastegar used some scholarship funds and money he saved from selling cars during the summer between college and law school to close his first real estate deal. He bought a single-family home in the Houston area and then flipped it for a profit.

“While I was in law school, I finally had the itch … to go out and start my first real estate investment company,” Rastegar said. “Being someone who loves arts and loves history and loves literature, real estate is a beautiful marriage of all of these things. It incorporates the sociology and the psychology of the city as much as it does the businesses that it houses, or the people that it houses.”

Rastegar worked as vice president of investments for Chelsea Hotels before founding his firm.

“There’s so much more to real estate than just bricks and mortar,” Rastegar said. “It was through that investigation of the depth that real estate has, and the effect it has on culture, the effects it’s had on history, all married together is really what ingrained this deep love for the practice.”