Michael Atkins

Michael Atkins is President and Principal of Cormorant Capital, a New York–based real estate equity firm he has led since roughly 2013. Cormorant provides discretionary equity capital to real estate owners and operators, co-investing alongside them in select transactions and advising clients on equity solutions for new deals and existing portfolios. The firm emphasizes balanced joint-venture economics and "alignment of interests between partners." In parallel, Atkins has served as an Advisor to CrowdStreet, the online commercial-real-estate investment marketplace, since around 2015.

Before founding Cormorant, Atkins spent his early career in title insurance and international real estate. He worked at Fidelity National Financial from 2004 to 2011, first as a Europe Project Manager and then as AVP for Europe & Asia (2005–2011), giving him a cross-border transactional background. Earlier, he was a consultant at the World Economic Forum (2003–2004). He has also been associated with MLA Risk Advisory.

Atkins has an unusually international and academic educational profile. He earned a B.A. from New York University (1997–2001), double-majoring in Linguistics and French with a minor in Music, followed by an M.A. in French and Political Science from the University of North Texas (2001–2002). He then studied at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, Switzerland (2002–2005), earning a DEA/post-graduate certificate in International Economy, Law and Political Science as both a Fulbright Scholar and a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar.

• Provides discretionary joint-venture / co-investment equity to real estate owner-operators, "sourcing and deploying capital" alongside real estate professionals rather than making passive minority bets.
• Targets value-add and opportunistic strategies: value-add multifamily (unit upgrades), speculative/opportunistic industrial and self-storage development, redevelopment, and direct investments in real estate operating companies.
• Prioritizes alignment of interests and creative capital-stack solutions for owner/operators facing equity gaps.
• Willing to underwrite specialized, harder-to-finance niches — e.g., memory-care/senior housing, medical office, and licensed cannabis real estate (an area where he has spoken and written on the special requirements of the legalized-marijuana sector).
• Also advises and channels retail/individual capital into CRE deals through his long-standing CrowdStreet advisory role.