Gregory Adler

Greg Adler is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Blackbird Investment Group, a boutique real estate investment management firm he co-founded in 2014 in Chicago alongside Todd Vender. Both founders previously worked together at Blue Vista Capital Management. Their departure to launch Blackbird was notable enough to draw a 2014 lawsuit from Blue Vista, as reported by Crain's Chicago Business.

Prior to founding Blackbird, Adler was a Principal at Blue Vista Capital Management (BVCM), which he joined shortly after the firm's inception in 2002. During his tenure there, he was involved in capital raising, fund structuring, and investment strategy execution, helping grow the firm from a startup into an investment management business with 35+ employees and more than $1 billion in equity capital under management.

Earlier in his career, Adler worked as an Analyst in the Mergers Strategic Advisory Group at Goldman Sachs in New York City from 2000 to 2002, where he supported merger, acquisition, and divestiture transactions, high-yield and convertible debt financings, and public equity offerings. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Michigan Business School.

Across his career, Adler has participated in the acquisition, financing, and disposition of over $2 billion of real estate spanning the industrial, multifamily, office, retail, hospitality, and student housing sectors. According to Blackbird, the firm's leadership team has collectively invested together for more than a decade across over $3 billion of real estate.

• Asset class: Real estate — not venture/startup equity. Blackbird is described as a "multi-disciplinary, value-oriented investor."
• Strategy: Targets undervalued, overlooked, complex, or mispriced assets, creating value through development, leasing, repositioning, rehabilitation, and management improvements.
• Approach: Combines local market knowledge with national capital-markets expertise, layering in economic and demographic data to uncover relative-value opportunities and exploitable trends.
• Partnership model: Frequently partners with local and regional operators to source and execute deals.
• Sectors: Core focus on industrial, multifamily, and office, with additional activity in student housing, life science, self-storage, retail, and hospitality.
• Markets: Primary and secondary U.S. metros where mispricing or dislocation can be exploited.