Over the past 4 years, Samir has raised over $20 million of equity and is in the process of acquiring and developing over $100 million of real estate. He is responsible for land acquisition, project capitalization, and coordination of the design, entitlement, construction, and leasing process. He is currently working on developing a 24-acre mixed-use project consisting of approximately 320,000 sq. ft. of grocery anchored retail, office, restaurant, and destination hotel and conference facilities. Samir is also responsible for multiple 1.5-3 acre retail developments throughout California.

Prior to development, Samir worked as an investment banking financial analyst in London and New York for HSBC in the Debt Capital Markets Group and in Chicago for Houlihan Lokey Howard and Zukin, in the Financial Restructuring Group. Samir has worked on numerous restructurings, distressed mergers and acquisitions, recapitalizations, private placements, and valuations for corporations in and out of bankruptcy.  He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001 with a Bachelors of Arts in Economics and a Masters in Real Estate Development at the University of Southern California in 2009

Mr. Kassam began his career as an Investment Banker with Lehman Brothers, Inc. where he worked with private equity firms to source and finance leveraged acquisitions and to develop strategic alternatives for their existing portfolio companies.  He also worked with global industrial companies across a broad range of corporate finance projects including mergers and acquisitions, all tranches of debt offerings/underwriting (bank loan, high yield, and mezzanine), and both public and private equity offerings.

Mr. Kassam then joined CapitalSource Finance, LLC where he focused on making secured debt and mezzanine investments in healthcare companies.  After CapitalSource, Mr. Kassam joined Pacificor LLC, where he was the Senior Credit Analyst focusing on stressed, distressed and special situations credit opportunities.  Over his tenure, Pacificor’s returns outperformed the high yield indices by over 10% per year and the firm’s assets under management grew to $600 million from $200 million.

Mr. Kassam joined Quality Home Loans as its President and Chief Executive Officer one week after the company filed for Chapter 11 protection.  In addition to managing the day-to-day operations of the company, Mr. Kassam was responsible for navigating the bankruptcy process and architected a $167M securitization. 

Mr. Kassam graduated cum laude from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in Business Economics and Accounting.