Tony Barkan

Founder, CEO, and Co-Managing Principal

Tony Barkan is the CEO and a Founder and Co-Managing Principal of Allagash Opportunity Zone Partners. As Chair of both the Firm’s Operations Committee and Investment Committee, Mr. Barkan is involved in every business and investment decision made by Allagash. Mr. Barkan directly leads investment thesis development, portfolio modeling, and investment review for Allagash funds including their first offering, the Allagash Opportunity Zone CRE Fund I, a multi-property private equity real estate fund focusing on buying and improving underperforming workforce multifamily properties.

PPrior to founding Allagash from 2008-2015, Mr. Barkan was one of five Founding Principals and the Head of Commercial Real Estate at Seer Capital Management. As the firm grew assets to almost $4 billion, Mr. Barkan ran all aspects of the CRE portfolio – research, analytics, investment, and risk management. He planned and executed Seer’s LMI workforce housing rehabilitation and rental strategy growing that portfolio to 1,000 units in the Southeastern U.S. He also initiated, developed, and ran one of the largest global B-Piece investment businesses, driving transactions on over $20 billion of US CRE properties.

From 2001-2008, Mr. Barkan built and ran profitable fund investment platforms at Sailfish Capital Partners, Harbert Investment Management, and The Clinton Group. Over that span, Mr. Barkan built and led teams with as many as 20 people and managed portfolios with peak investor equity over $1 Billion, a peak long asset portfolio over $10 Billion, and peak total market exposure of almost $20 Billion. Notably, Mr. Barkan was an early identifier of the real estate-led economic crisis. By the beginning of 2007, he had migrated his hedge fund portfolio to be entirely short through the use of real estate-based derivatives.

From 1997-2001, Mr. Barkan was a Senior Portfolio Manager at Pareto Partners (originally Forstmann-Leff) helping build their top-decile performance among U.S. Core-Plus institutional portfolios. From 1988-1997, Mr. Barkan began his career at Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and ED&F Man Group trading a range of real estate debt, commodity products, and currencies.

Mr. Barkan supports Here Arts Center, where he has been Board Treasurer, Scholars at Risk, and CaringKind: The Heart of Alzheimer’s Caregiving. He has worked with Cristo Rey Brooklyn High School to help students with lower income backgrounds develop financial literacy, comfort with personal financial issues, and an understanding of professional opportunities within the financial markets. Mr. Barkan graduated from Princeton University where he was selected to the Honor Committee. Mr. Barkan is a member of the Triple Nine Society.