Charles Runnels

Charles "Duke" Runnels is a Los Angeles–based real estate and capital-markets executive with a career spanning four-plus decades. He studied at Pepperdine University from 1971 to 1975 and entered commercial real estate, serving as Senior Vice President at Oxford Properties, Inc. from 1981 to 1996 and as a Managing Director at CBRE Investors from September 2000 to March 2004. Since March 2004 he has been President of FORT Properties, Inc., a Los Angeles real estate investment company historically active as a sponsor of 1031-exchange and tenant-in-common (TIC) real estate offerings.

Since September 2013, Runnels has been a Managing Director of Capital Markets at T.R. Winston & Company, a boutique investment bank chaired by G. Tyler Runnels. The firm's bankers cite involvement in roughly $150 billion of transactions across S&P sectors, with a particular emphasis on healthcare/life sciences and energy, providing growth capital, private placements, M&A advisory, and strategic/regulatory guidance to private and public companies. In this role Runnels works on capital-raising and financing transactions across healthcare, oil & gas, business services, manufacturing, and technology.

Runnels is also the founder, Chairman and CEO of CTRL Collective, a Los Angeles coworking company launched in 2015 with a 23,000-square-foot flagship at 12575 Beatrice Street in Playa Vista. The business expanded to five locations — Playa Vista, Downtown Los Angeles, Huntington Beach, Pasadena, and Denver — before contracting. CTRL Collective never turned a profit (reported losses of $8.7M in 2017, $16M in 2018, $9M in 2019, and $7.1M in 2020) and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2022, listing roughly $4.2M in liabilities against about $529,300 in cash; its Pasadena location at 45 South Arroyo Parkway continued operating. Investors in the venture included Guess co-founder Maurice Marciano, Pacific Capital Management, and former CEO Robert Walston.

• Operates primarily as a capital-markets banker and financier rather than a traditional VC fund — sourcing and structuring growth-capital raises, private placements, and advisory mandates through T.R. Winston & Company.
• Sector emphasis on healthcare/life sciences and energy, the two areas T.R. Winston highlights as core; the firm also backs a diversified "emerging growth" bucket spanning consumer and technology.
• Deal sizes at the firm typically range from a few million to well over $100M, indicating a comfort with both early/seed-stage companies and larger middle-market financings.
• Deep real estate roots (Oxford, CBRE Investors, FORT Properties) mean property, workspace, and asset-backed situations are a natural fit.
• Firm positioning: provides "growth capital, strategic advisory, regulatory, policy and reimbursement strategies" for healthcare companies and "capital markets and financial advisory solutions to middle-market companies in the energy sector."