Community Highlights: Meet Taylor Avakian of The Group CRE

Today we’d like to introduce you to Taylor Avakian.

Hi Taylor, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I wanted to play college baseball and genuinely thought that was going to be my career. When that didn’t pan out, I had zero plan B. I was in college, trying to figure out what came next, and my family friend suggested I get my real estate license. Honestly, I didn’t even know what commercial real estate was at that point.
I got my start at Matthews Real Estate Investment Services, which was basically my MBA. That’s where I learned how to underwrite deals, position properties, and tell a story with numbers. More importantly, it’s where I learned that your reputation is the only thing that compounds in this business. Every deal either builds it or chips away at it.
Pretty early on I made a decision to focus exclusively on apartment buildings in Los Angeles. No office, no retail, no industrial. Just LA apartments. People thought that was too narrow, but it gave me a real edge. I wasn’t trying to know a little about everything. I wanted to know everything about one thing.
In 2023, I launched The Group CRE as my own team. That was terrifying. I had maybe six months of runway saved up. But I knew I wanted to build something where the entire operation revolved around serving apartment building owners at a higher level than what I was seeing in the market.
Since then we’ve closed over $300 million in multifamily transactions with a 97.6% list-to-sales ratio. I started the No Vacancy podcast, where I sit down with LA’s top multifamily investors and owners and just talk about what’s actually happening in this market. I co-founded the AI for CRE Collective because I think the brokers and investors who embrace technology are going to outperform everyone else. And in 2023, the LA Times named me a Commercial Real Estate Visionary, which was a huge moment for me.
But if I’m being real, the thing I’m most proud of is the team and the relationships. My team, Cy, Mishan, Freddie, Brandon, they make this thing go. And the owners who trust me with their biggest financial decisions, some of them buildings their families have owned for decades, that responsibility is something I never take lightly.
The through-line from baseball to brokerage is honestly the same: show up every day, put in the reps, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and never stop competing.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not even close. I think anyone who says the road was smooth is either lying or didn’t push hard enough.
My first year in the business I didn’t close a deal for about eight months. I was cold calling apartment building owners in Koreatown, getting hung up on constantly, door knocking buildings where people wouldn’t even answer. I had no pipeline, no reputation, no referrals. Just a phone and a list. There were real moments where I questioned whether I’d picked the wrong career.
The financial side was brutal too. When you’re commission-only and you’re 23 years old with no safety net, every month without a closing feels like a countdown. I watched guys I started with quit after three months, six months. The attrition rate in brokerage is insane. Most people don’t make it past year one.
Then when I launched The Group CRE in 2023, I basically pressed reset on everything. I went from having the infrastructure of a larger firm behind me to figuring out operations, marketing, compliance, deal management, all of it, while still being the one on the phone generating business. The learning curve of being a business owner on top of being a producing broker was steep. Things I never thought about before, like building systems, hiring the right people, managing a team, suddenly those were my problems to solve.
And the LA market itself doesn’t make it easy. Rent control, the ULA transfer tax, rising insurance costs, shifting cap rates. The regulatory environment here changes constantly. I’ve had deals fall apart because of things completely outside anyone’s control. You learn pretty quickly that resilience isn’t optional in this business.
The biggest struggle, honestly, was the mental side. Learning to separate my self-worth from my production numbers. In the early days, a lost listing felt personal. A deal falling out of escrow would wreck my whole week. I had to develop a mindset where I could take the hit, learn from it, and move on to the next one. Baseball actually helped with that. You go 0-for-4 on Tuesday, you still have to step in the box on Wednesday.
Every struggle taught me something I still use today. The cold calling grind taught me discipline. The lean months taught me to build systems so I’d never be that vulnerable again. And going out on my own taught me that the only way to build something meaningful is to bet on yourself, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
The Group CRE is a boutique brokerage in Los Angeles that focuses exclusively on the sale of apartment buildings. That’s all we do. We don’t dabble in office, retail, or industrial. We don’t cover five states. We sell apartment buildings in LA, and we’ve built every part of our business around doing that one thing at an extremely high level.
What we’re known for is precision. We’ve closed over $300 million in multifamily transactions with a 97.6% list-to-sales ratio. That number means something. It means when we tell an owner what their building is worth, we’re not throwing out an inflated number to win the listing. We’re giving them a real, defensible price backed by the data, and then we’re executing on it.
We work with all types of apartment building owners. Families who’ve held properties for 30, 40 years. Investors looking to reposition capital. Trustees managing estate sales. Each situation is different, and that’s where we separate ourselves. We’re not running a volume play where every client gets the same templated pitch. We dig into each owner’s specific goals, their tax situation, their timeline, their emotional connection to the property, and we build a strategy around that.
Our team is small and intentional. My operations lead Cy keeps the backend running tight. Mishan coordinates every transaction from escrow to close. Freddie and Brandon are on the phones prospecting and building relationships with owners every day. We run lean, but everyone on the team touches real work. Nobody’s sitting on the sidelines.
Beyond the brokerage, I host the No Vacancy podcast, where I interview LA’s most active multifamily investors and owners. The conversations are candid. We talk about what’s actually happening in the market, what’s working, what’s not, and what owners need to be thinking about. I also co-founded the AI for CRE Collective, which is a community focused on helping real estate professionals use AI and technology to work smarter. I think the industry is at an inflection point with technology, and the people who lean in now are going to have a massive advantage.
What I’m most proud of brand-wise is that we’ve built trust in a space where trust is hard to come by. Commercial real estate, especially in LA, has a reputation for brokers who overpromise and underdeliver. We’ve gone the opposite direction. We’d rather give an owner an honest valuation and lose a listing than inflate a number just to get a sign on the building. That approach has cost us business in the short term, but it’s the reason people refer us and come back to us.
If there’s one thing I’d want readers to know, it’s that we treat every building like it’s our own. Whether it’s a four-unit in Mid-City or a 91-unit portfolio in Hollywood, the level of attention and preparation is the same. That’s the standard, and it doesn’t change based on the size of the deal.

How do you think about happiness?
Competing. That’s the honest answer. I’m wired for it. Whether it’s going after a listing, building the business, or just trying to get better at something every day, the competition is what drives me. It’s been that way since I was a kid playing baseball. The game changed, but the feeling of going after something and earning it never went away.
Beyond that, building something that’s mine. When I was working for someone else, I was grateful for the experience, but there was always this pull to create something from scratch. Watching The Group CRE grow from just me and a phone into a real team with real systems and a reputation people trust, that makes me happy in a way that’s hard to describe. It’s not about the money. It’s about looking at something and knowing you built it brick by brick.
My team makes me happy. Watching Freddie and Brandon develop as brokers, seeing Cy and Mishan operate at a level that makes the whole machine run, that’s fulfilling. I played team sports my whole life, and there’s nothing like working toward something with people who care as much as you do.
And honestly, the relationships with owners. I know that sounds like a broker thing to say, but I mean it. Some of my closest relationships started with a cold call. An owner picks up, we start talking, and five years later I’m helping their family navigate one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. That trust is earned over time, and it means a lot to me when someone says, “I want Taylor to handle this.”
On a personal level, I’m happiest when I’m learning. I’m always reading, listening to podcasts, studying how other people in different industries think about growth and strategy. I co-founded the AI for CRE Collective because I genuinely get excited about where technology is taking this industry. That curiosity keeps things fun, even on the hard days.
The short version: I’m happy when I’m growing, competing, and doing it alongside people I respect.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thegroupcre.com/
• Instagram: @tayloravakian
• Facebook: @tayloravakian
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tayloravakian/
• Twitter: https://x.com/TAYVAY_
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaylorAvakian
• Other: https://www.skool.com/ai-for-cre-collective/about?ref=3b3ff2c0ccce44ba8039fafd54bf291a