Tony Barkan

Mr. Barkan began designing Allagash in 2015 by foster partnerships which could offer investors compelling private equity real estate (”PERE”) opportunities with three equal and complementary objectives: (i) capital preservation, (ii) outsized returns and (ii) positive social impact on the communities being invested into. With a separate set of partners, the Allagash Opportunity Zone CRE Fund I LP (“AOZCREI”) was launched in 2019 just before the onset of the pandemic. Nonetheless, AOZCREI became the first Qualified Opportunity Zone Fund (“QOF”) to utilize Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (“LIHTC”) to create returns for third-party QOF investors when it was able to purchase, recapitalize, and renovate an unperforming and undermaintained multifamily property in Newport News, Virginia. Allagash PERE Investment Partners, LLC, the Investment Manager of Allagash SFR+ Partners LP, will pursue the same three objectives by opportunistically purchasing, thoughtfully renovating, efficiently managing, and strategically liquidating residential rental properties comprised of 1-to-16-unit buildings (“SFR+”) which affordable serve LMI communities in secondary MSAs within the eastern half of the United States.

From 2008-2015 prior to founding Allagash Partners, Mr. Barkan was one of five Founding Principals and Investment Committee Members at Seer Capital Management. As Head of Real Estate Investments, Mr. Barkan planned and executed Seer’s single-family LMI housing rehabilitation and rental strategy growing that portfolio to 1,000 units in the Southeastern U.S. He also initiated, developed, and ran the second largest CMBS B-Piece investment business globally, driving deals and approving loans backed by over $20 billion of US CRE properties.

From 2001-2008, Mr. Barkan built and ran profitable alternative investment platforms, including investment, research, trading, operations, and risk management teams with as many as 20 people, at Sailfish Capital Partners, Harbert Investment Management, and Clinton Group. Over that span, Mr. Barkan managed peak investor equity over $1 Billion, a peak asset portfolio over $10 Billion, and peak total market exposure over $20 Billion. Notably, Mr. Barkan was an early identifier of the real estate-led Global Financial Crisis (“GFC”) and by the beginning of 2007, had migrated his hedge fund portfolio positions to be entirely short.

From 1997-2001, Mr. Barkan was the Senior Portfolio Manager responsible for Commercial MBS, Residential MBS, and ABS and was a founding member of the Fixed Income Investment Committee at Pareto Partners (originally Forstmann-Leff). He helped Pareto become a top decile Core and Core-Plus Fixed Income Manager by initiating a short MBS sector allocation versus benchmarks in advance of Russia’s default and the Long-Term Credit crisis. He then reversed that positioning by purchasing deep-credit Mortgage-Backed Securities once the market had bottomed. He also managed the interest rate and securitized product risk in Forstmann-Leff’s first fixed income hedge fund and established the firm as a CBO/CDO manager at the birth of that marketplace.

From 1988-1997, Mr. Barkan began his career as a sell-side trader at Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and ED&F Man Group trading a range of real estate debt, commodity products, and currencies.

Mr. Barkan served as Board Treasurer of Here Arts Center and supports Scholars at Risk and CaringKind: The Heart of Alzheimer’s Caregiving. He has worked with Cristo Rey Brooklyn High School to help students with lower income backgrounds develop financial literacy, comfort with personal financial issues, and an understanding of professional opportunities within the financial markets.

Mr. Barkan graduated from Princeton University where he played football (briefly) and was selected to the Honor Committee. He resides in New York, NY, the city in which he was born and raised, with his wife and 4 daughters. Mr. Barkan is a member of the Triple Nine Society.