Weekend Interview: Uncommon Capital’s Ben Harris On Niche Investing, A Slower 2025 And His Obsession With AI

This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the dealmakers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities who keep CRE interesting.

Ben Harris founded Uncommon Capital Group to open up commercial real estate opportunities traditionally reserved for institutional players to private wealth investors. 

He started the company in 2020, well before market conditions sidelined many of those institutional players and opened the door for private capital to fill the gap. Now, he’s leveraging the latest advancements in technology to provide even greater value for his investors.

“Real estate is an interesting industry,” Harris said. “It's been around for many, many decades, and even though technology has advanced, it hasn't really permeated its way into how the real estate industry has done things. I'm not talking about just buying and building deals, but really the entire ecosystem. 

“At Uncommon, we've become kind of borderline obsessed with artificial intelligence,” he added.

Harris spoke to Bisnow about leveraging AI in commercial real estate, founding his company and forecasting the financial environment for the year ahead.  

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bisnow: How did Uncommon Capital Group get its start, and where did you see the need for this kind of platform in a lower-rate environment?

Ben Harris: I founded Uncommon Capital Group in 2020 on the heels of two incredibly formative job experiences. The first one was at a subsidiary of Starwood Capital Group. I was the sixth employee, and at the time, we had a strategy that wasn't yet funded. Fast forward two years and we went from six employees to over 200 employees, from zero in assets under management to over $7B in assets under management. It was this incredibly formative experience, all entirely funded by institutional investors.

Then I moved to another Chicago-based firm, Origin Investments, which at the time was a very emerging manager with ambitions to grow into a well-known brand. Two principals asked if I would start and lead the investor relations and business development team. At the time, I was 25 years old. I did not have institutional relationships. I also really didn't have many relationships with high-net-worth individuals, but I felt like I could have some success there. After five years, we raised hundreds of millions of dollars with that strategy, and I realized just how underserved high-net-worth individuals, family offices and wealth management firms were in the real estate private equity space. Either they weren't seeing anything at all, they were seeing a suboptimal deal at the country club or someone was bringing them something that was pretty picked over.

I started Uncommon Capital Group in 2020 to change that. I really wanted to bring an institutional experience to private-wealth investors, and what that meant was curating a group of family offices, wealth management platforms and ultra-high-net-worth individuals and then curating select opportunities with that. We're really trying to redefine private real estate investing.

Bisnow: Are these opportunities curated in a particular asset class? 

Harris: Our primary focus is in middle-market, real estate private equity funds that are anywhere from $150M up to $500M. In terms of asset classes, we still like some of the main food groups, but we really like the niches. Historically, industrial has been our largest, most favorite asset class.

But more recently, we've been working in industrial outdoor storage. Historically, we did some in multifamily, but more recently, we’ve been doing a lot more student housing. We've been focusing on the niches because we think those offer really strong risk-adjusted opportunities, especially in the middle markets. 

Bisnow: What excites you about building a company from the ground up?

Harris: Real estate is an interesting industry. It's been around for many, many decades, and even though technology has advanced, it hasn't really permeated its way into how the real estate industry has done things. I'm not talking about just buying and building deals, but really the entire ecosystem. 

At Uncommon, we've become kind of borderline obsessed with artificial intelligence. I was an early adopter, using it more in my personal life, but pretty quickly realizing just how powerful it can be for businesses today. With the pace of innovation, I realized just how powerful it will be in several months. I can't even imagine what it will look like in a few years. 

We mapped out all of our processes and figured out where artificial intelligence could take something and make it faster and give us back some of our own time. For example, we actually have various custom GPTs for different tasks, and that's something that I was able to play with on a weekend, wake up on a Monday and do it, because it's my business and we're entrepreneurial. It’s that part of the process that gets me really excited.

Bisnow: Does AI give you a bit of additional leverage to be able to punch above your weight when using some of these technologies, like these custom GPTs?

Harris: Our mission is to help private investors do better in real estate investing. So with that always being our North Star, I know that I want to see as much as possible and be able to work through that funnel as thoroughly as possible so that what drops out of the bottom are the best-curated opportunities. That is a very time-consuming process. That’s why I just hired a vice president of investments to help oversee that process with me. 

But there's a lot that can be done with leveraging artificial intelligence. For example, we built a custom screener that we can just pop in a deck and it will automatically score it for us based on what we told it it cares about. We have seven table-stakes criteria that just have to be met for us to even take the initial call before we advance into diligence because that part of the process is very time-consuming. Sometimes, investors say, “How'd you meet with 400 groups last year?” That's because we can leverage technology to do it. We can actually figure out who's worthwhile spending time on pretty quickly by leveraging technology.

Bisnow: How do your clients feel about the use of AI in your workflow?

Harris: It's just an initial screener, and at the end of the day, it is not running the full diligence process. We are still leveraging our decades of experience and institutional expertise to really run a comprehensive, multimonth diligence process, but there are parts that artificial intelligence is helpful for. What we do when we meet with current clients to give them updates or meet with prospective clients, we pop open the screen, ask them to send us any deck and we pop it in. And in under five seconds, it's perfectly summarized for them. That's just the high-level screener. 

Now, you can't trust everything that you read in a deck. Certainly, there's legal documents, you have to vet the strategy. That today all happens outside of our GPT, and that's the process that we run on behalf of our clients. That's really our huge value-add to them. But certainly they're impressed by the technology, and they understand we're in our earliest days of building it. They can see where it might be going, and it does help us stand out from the crowd. Not many groups are doing it, and we're not doing it for show. It's actually effective.

Bisnow: What else do you utilize AI for?

Harris: Content. A huge part of our value-add is educating our clients. The family offices, the wealth management professionals, the ultra-high-net-worth individuals, they're highly sophisticated, but they're also nonindustry professionals to real estate specifically. So they're very curious and they're investing large amounts of money. They want to understand the inner workings. They aren’t investors who are just making surface-level decisions. We do a lot of content, not to just say “industrial is good,” but to actually explain the supply-and-demand fundamentals, market by market — what tenants are doing and getting into the guts of it. We do leverage artificial intelligence to really break down some of those industry reports. 

Bisnow: How has company strategy evolved from when you started it in 2020 to the higher-for-longer environment that we've settled in to today? 

Harris: Uncommon has become even more selective. We still evaluate as many opportunities as we ever have, but instead of working on maybe four to six opportunities per year, it might be one to two per year. That's just what we find compelling. In this higher-rate environment, real estate broadly does not offer the same risk-adjusted returns that it used to, and less and less opportunities are interesting to us. We really refuse to lower our bar. It's just being ultra selective.

We also have been spending even more time with our clients. Education is a very key part of what we do. I'm young, and I want to be doing this for the next 30 years, not the next three years. We are always taking a long-term mindset on relationship building. We're breaking down what investors are already investing in and how those investments are performing, what we're seeing generally in the market and what we think might come next. It's super worthwhile for me because it gets me out and gets a pulse on the marketplace. And I like people, so it's fun to spend time with them. 

Bisnow: How do you see the financing environment evolving throughout the rest of the year?

Harris: I never pretend to have a crystal ball. I've worked for a lot of smart people over the years, and they always said that, and I agree. Every time I think I might have it figured out, something comes out of left field. If you're asking me to make a forecast, I think we'll probably have a bit of a slow year again.

It's earlier in the year, and so things can certainly change. There's a lot of uncertainty with the new administration, but they're also just a month into being in office. So maybe we get some more answers and questions over the coming months. 

But regardless of that, with the 10-year Treasury back near all-time highs, it's really unclear what's going to change that anytime soon. It will have a continued cooling effect on the transaction market. Not that there aren’t interesting pockets of investment opportunities, but it's just not broad-based like it was in that late 2020, 2021 range. We might be signed up for another slower year.

Bisnow: How have the Trump administration's policies come up in conversations you’ve had in your day-to-day? 

Harris: It's impossible to ignore what's going on in the world because the world impacts investments and specifically real estate, so they are part of my daily conversations. People are just trying to digest in real time. Some have an opinion. Some are just paying attention. Some want my opinion. 

It's too early to tell. It's been about a month, and I think everybody is willing to see what happens over the next few months. In the meantime, I do think a lot of investors are taking a wait-and-see approach. They have the benefit of time. Nothing is forcing them to act today or tomorrow. If they have a few months to evaluate an opportunity, they'll probably use all of those months. 

Bisnow: Give us a bold prediction for the rest of the year.

Harris: My bold prediction is that every adult American will be using artificial intelligence in some capacity by the end of the year. 

Bisnow: Are they going to be using ChatGPT or DeepSeek?

Harris: They'll be using ChatGPT. It's an American-based company, and it's highly accessible. 

Bisnow: What’s your weekend routine or favorite weekend activity?

Harris: For me, weekends are all about family time. I work a lot during the week and love to run around the city with my wife and my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, checking out new restaurants, museums, parks when it's nice outside, and then certainly take advantage of the me time during nap times. I make it to the gym, I'll go golfing and I geek out way too often on playing around with ChatGPT.