Shaul Kuba

Shaul Kuba grew up in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, and served in the Israeli army in the same brigade as his childhood friend Avi Shemesh. The two emigrated to the United States in the 1980s and started a landscaping business in Los Angeles; Kuba also ran an electrical business during that period. One of their landscaping customers was Richard Ressler, a former Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banker, who joined them to invest in real estate. Before founding CIM, Kuba was involved in earlier entrepreneurial real estate ventures, including co-founding Dekel Development.

In 1994, Kuba, Shemesh and Ressler founded CIM Group, which has grown into a major institutional real estate, infrastructure and credit manager. As of December 31, 2025, CIM owned 304 assets comprising roughly $32.0 billion of commercial property, with more than 900 employees. Kuba has more than 25 years of real estate, infrastructure and lending experience and sits on CIM's Investment Committee.

As head of CIM's development team, Kuba leads the development, redevelopment and repositioning of the firm's real estate assets, and he personally sources opportunities and maintains relationships with national and regional retailers, hospitality brands and restaurateurs. He is closely associated with CIM's community-focused, urban "qualified communities" strategy — most visibly its large-scale transformation of the West Adams neighborhood in Los Angeles.

In March 2023, Kuba was named Chief Investment Officer of Creative Media & Community Trust Corporation (CMCT), a CIM-managed REIT focused on premier multifamily and creative-office assets, where he also serves on the board and directs the expansion of its portfolio in high-barrier-to-entry markets. He has appeared on the Los Angeles Business Journal's LA500 list for roughly a decade of consecutive years.

• Invests institutional capital directly into real estate assets rather than into startups; focus is acquisition, ground-up development, redevelopment and repositioning.
• Targets dense, transit-oriented, "high barrier to entry" urban submarkets and concentrates capital block-by-block to reshape whole districts (the West Adams strategy is the clearest example — dozens of parcels developed at once).
• Asset types: creative office, multifamily, mixed-use, retail, hospitality, plus infrastructure and real estate debt across CIM's platforms.
• Emphasis on "community qualified" urban neighborhoods and placemaking — pairing ground-floor retail, restaurants and hospitality with residential density above.
• At CMCT, the stated mandate is expanding a portfolio of "highly amenitized, premier multifamily and creative office assets in dynamic, high barrier to entry markets," increasingly via co-investment partnerships for next-generation assets.