Real Estate Rebounding as Forward’s Beam Shows 46% Return

Joel Beam stood out as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1990s. On a campus where jeans and T-shirts predominated, he was the one often wearing the coat and tie.

Back then, Beam was a humanities major who also had an interest in real estate. As a freshman, he’d worked part time as a clerk for a local real estate developer. Then, as a sophomore, he landed an internship at Liquidity Fund Investment Corp., an investment firm specializing in distressed real estate securities.