Clarion Partners’ Josh Pristaw - an industrious approach to real estate investing

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.

Today’s podcast dives into the world of real estate with one of the industry’s largest managers and investors in industrial real estate.

We sat down in Franklin Templeton’s New York City office with real estate veteran Josh Pristaw, Managing Director, President of Clarion Partners, a $73.3B AUM real estate investment firm within Franklin Templeton’s alternatives platform.

Josh discussed data and durable demographics, which are drivers of the deeply researched investment process that his team at Clarion employs to invest in industrial real estate.

Josh’s background, which spans developing shopping centers to investing in real estate in Brazil to running one of the industry’s leading single-family rental investing platforms at Pretium, has helped him lead Clarion, one of the industry’s largest industrial real estate investment platforms.

Josh and I had a fascinating conversation, connecting data and demographics to actionable insights in real estate investing. We covered:

The durable demographic and secular trends driving Clarion’s investment strategy in healthcare real estate.How 10,000 people turning 80 years old in the US daily is creating an “aging in place” dynamic that is impacting housing supply and self-storage demand.Why industrial demand is tied to e-commerce growth.How Clarion takes a quantitative approach to real estate investing, evaluating sub-markets using recursive factor analysis.How diversification and liquidity drive Clarion’s open-ended fund strategy, with 95% of the firm’s $73.3B in AUM residing in open-ended funds.Why data centers pose liquidity, capex, valuation, and concentration challenges for open-ended fund vehicles.

Bio

Josh Pristaw, equity owner and Managing Director, is President of Clarion Partners. He is a member of the Firm’s Executive Board, Investment Committee, and the Board of Directors for Clarion Partners Holdings, LLC. He joins Clarion from Pretium, where he served as Senior Managing Director and Head of Pretium’s real estate platform. Prior to Pretium, Josh co-founded GTIS Partners.

He has more than two decades of real estate experience across property sectors and functions, including acquisitions, asset management, portfolio development, and capital markets. He joined Clarion Partners in 2025 and has been working in the industry since 1997. Josh graduated from Dartmouth College, B.A. (1997).

Thanks, Josh, for sharing your wisdom, expertise, and passion about real estate investing and your data-driven approach to the asset class.

Show Notes

00:00 Introduction

01:14 Message from Ultimus Fund Solutions, Our Sponsor

02:44 Josh Career Origins

03:55 Real Estate Scale Shifts

04:51 Understand Demographics and Mega Trends

05:35 Senior Housing Supply Gap

07:12 Housing Turnover and Storage

08:24 Data Models Across Sectors

09:21 Data Driven Allocation Lens

09:57 Four Drivers of Returns

12:16 Timing Bets and Liquidity

15:17 Lessons Learned From Building In Brazil

18:06 Invitation Homes Data Ops

19:44 Clarion Data Science Edge

21:06 Quant Meets Relationships

22:11 Asset Class Specialists 

23:16 Industrial Demand Megatrends

23:32 Ecommerce Trillion Wave

24:16 Efficiency And Taller Warehouses 

4:58 Robotics Power Premium

26:54 Infrastructure Constraints 

29:44 Why Not Data Centers

34:27 Supply Glut More Sellers

33:10 Liquidity Supply Imbalance

36:12 Evergreen Fund Playbook

39:26 Portfolio Rotation Discipline

41:16 Career Advice and Wrap Up

A Word from Our Sponsor, Ultimus

This episode of Alt Goes Mainstream is brought to you by Ultimus, the full-service fund administrator and transfer agent powering asset managers in private and public markets. As alts go mainstream, you need real expertise to handle complex fund structures, connect with key distribution partners, and handle sophisticated compliance, reporting, and transparency demands.

That’s Ultimus: high-tech, high-touch solutions for over 450 clients and 2,500 funds with $775B in assets under administration. Backed by an expert team of over 1,200 employees, they place client service at the core of their business, helping you navigate complexity during your fund structuring or launch and then supporting you through every stage of growth. Whether you’re already in the market or thinking about entering private wealth, you can trust their team’s deep expertise in retail alternatives to help you reach your goals.

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We thank Ultimus for their support of alts going mainstream.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant.