COVER STORY
MADINA SHAIK
Titan of Multifamily: Madina Shaik, CEO of Makaan Investment Group SHAIK’S SIMPLE PLAN TO DOMINATE MULTIFAMILY INVESTING ISN’T “ROCKET SCIENCE.”
By Katie Bean
rowing up in southern India, Madina Shaik was passionate
bubble burst in the early 2000s. He had to let go of his employees, primarily colleagues from India who had H-1B visas. As work dried up, Shaik didn’t have projects to assign them. Reflecting on that, Shaik said he reinvented himself and his company. He shifted his focus to government contracting. Around the time Shaik became a U.S. citizen in 2004, he began consulting for the U.S. Army. Though he and his family had settled in Houston, he began rebuilding his company in Washington, D.C., to accommodate the government work, and traveled there weekly. By 2016, he decided to put the pedal to the metal and shift into growth mode. Now, his consulting company, CompQSoft, is a $100 million company with 500 employees and a full slate of senior leadership in D.C. DIVING INTO REAL ESTATE As Shaik’s consulting business prospered, he began to think about diversifying with real estate investing. In 2008, he bought some single-family homes as rental properties. He asked a friend to manage them and to continue to find more properties for him to buy. Time passed and there were no further
acquisitions. Still, he wanted to dive deeper into real estate. “It was a to-do thing on my list, but I did not have time to do it,” Shaik said. “But when COVID started, all my meetings got canceled. No travel to D.C. So, I had a lot of time on my hands, and I was just getting bored. So that’s the time I kind of got into the real estate.” Not one to sit idly, Shaik began reading books about investing and talking to other real estate investors. He bought nearly 100 single-family homes to rent in 2020, but he quickly realized he couldn’t scale up one house at a time. “So, I said, OK, now I need to move into the real estate. I’m going to buy multifamily apartment complexes,” he said. He didn’t start by dipping his toe—he jumped all the way in. Shaik started Makaan Investment Group and bought his first apartment complex in 2021. He made 12 acquisitions worth about $350 million in 12 months, totaling about 3,500 apartment units. “That’s my nature. I want every- thing done yesterday,” he said. During the past year, he put off further acquisitions to stabilize the complexes he owned, avoid high interest rates, build his team,
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about civil engineering and decided he wanted to be part of the building process. Today, he’s a titan of multifamily investing, building and renovating thousands of units. Of course, it wasn’t a straight line from his childhood dream to becoming the CEO of Houston-based Makaan Investment Group. SETTING THE FOUNDATION Shaik didn’t become a civil engineer. Instead, he studied electronics. As a young man in the 1980s and ‘90s, he could see computing becoming
the way of the future, whereas engineering was saturated. He
received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in India and immigrated to the United States for a job in technology. Soon, he decided to work for himself, creating a technology consulting company in 1997. He worked alone for a few years until colleagues began reaching out, asking if he was hiring. “That’s how I built my company, actually,” he said. “So, by the time I realized [it], I had around 200 people working for me.” Unfortunately, his company suffered a setback when the dot-com
20 | think realty magazine :: september – october 2023
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