We recently had the chance to connect with Daren Laureano and have shared our conversation below.
Daren, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
I think this one’s easy for me—family makes me laugh and feel proud. We have four kids: our oldest just graduated from Baylor University and is launching her commercial real estate career in Dallas. Her two brothers are both in college—one is finishing his senior year at Baylor studying Digital Media and Marketing, and the other is a sophomore at TCU in Fort Worth studying Investment Finance. Our youngest is a high school senior, likely heading to TCU as well to study Business Finance and Marketing. Lots for us to be proud of!
At Southern California Equity, we also find plenty of reasons to laugh. Building a maiden fund provides no shortage of material—especially when we mix in movie references. Adapting our commercial real estate systems to be understood by both family office and institutional investment teams—with their vastly different backgrounds—offers plenty of humorous moments. These teams often operate in data-heavy environments, so our blend of deep analytics and practical reality sometimes requires us to step back and paint the full picture.
I joke that I already have the crystal ball to see into the future—I just need the magic wand and long white beard to complete our own Hogwarts of real estate. We’ve got both Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions. But after 30 years of sourcing deals, what feels obvious to us isn’t always obvious to others. Many in finance focus on risk, liability, and delay assessment—but understanding how those three hide in plain sight within real estate deals, and how built-in checks and balances expose bad ideas, isn’t magic. It’s just experience.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Southern California Equity Inc (SCE) is a highly sophisticated real estate investment sponsor with three decades of experience investing in the needs of the innovation economy. Being part of this innovative ecosystem inspires all facets of our business from identifying unique opportunities to creating cutting-edge environments, our multi-disciplined team combines entrepreneurial spirit with an institutional investment approach to deliver specialized real estate investment strategies. Nashville is an exciting market for our investment firm for many reasons but primarily due to our expertise in technology centric real estate for entertainment studios and medical bio tech including AI. Our adaptive reuse and deep repositioning method to re-invent existing property in an environmentally sustainable practice is perfectly set for the Nashville market.
Southern California Equity, Inc is the only vertically integrated investment platform mastering all seven essential disciplines for successful efficient investing: Fiduciary Management, In-house Acquisition Deal Sourcing, Regulation, Development, Architecture, Construction, Management/Leasing. SCE, Inc. is a brand expansion of our groundbreaking and innovative multidisciplinary capital deployment real estate affiliate Southern California Land Use Inc (SCLU). SCLU has stood out as the only real estate industry expert in all disciplines delivering comprehensive, independent third party, fiduciary strategy and investment management directly into a variety of investment funds, LP advisory boards, institutional funds, family offices, independent investors, legal forensic analysts, real estate attorneys, commercial brokers and leasing negotiators. The fund management team in SCE Inc. is experienced in managing real estate through multiple market cycles and has delivered an edge to General Partner investment managers for decades. Over our 25 years, we have executed a broader spectrum of real estate fund strategies than other competing private equity or real estate firms. Prior strategies include hotels and hospitality, restaurants and bars, multifamily investments, mixed-use residential investments, low income multifamily investment, housing density bonuses, residential and commercial subdivisions, manufacturing, office, flex creative office, retail, museums, sports facilities, media entertainment, sound stages, gaming studios, medical/biotech, historic landmarks, educational institutions, childcare facilities, large multi-building campuses, California coastal assets, complex hillside assets, and combinations of them all.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
That’s a great question. I was attending a business banquet for an organization I belonged to, and one of the scheduled speakers—who I had heard before and really enjoyed—got up to speak during dessert and coffee. I was expecting a solid 30 or 40 minutes.
He walked up to the podium, paused, and said:
“Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your fate.”
That single sentence hit me like a light bulb going off. It was the clearest, most powerful thing I’d ever heard from a speaker. And he was absolutely right.
I turned to my wife and said, “We could leave now. That was everything I needed to hear.” There was no arguing with it—no debating or getting around it. It was a universal truth, like gravity.
What’s in your calendar is your fate. If there’s nothing in it, then there’s no plan, no momentum—no future. It became my personal measuring stick for effort and direction. And while winning isn’t everything, the effort to win absolutely is.
When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
It’s a bit of a long story, but here’s the short version.
I had gone to hear an interesting speaker who posed a few powerful questions to the group. One came from him directly, and the other—though unintentional—came from my friend Shawn Wachter, who happened to be standing behind me after the talk.
The speaker’s question stood out because it challenged a familiar pattern. He said that throughout life, we’re often asked: “What do you want to be?” and later, “What do you do?”—questions that almost always refer to a job or career. But then he asked something different: “How do you want to live?” That hit me. No one had ever asked me that—especially not in a group setting. It reframed the conversation completely into finding a lifestyle first and then an industry or career that would feed that passion.
Then, after the talk, Shawn was speaking to a different group behind me. I wasn’t even part of the conversation, but I overheard him say to others, “Drinking is not a success habit.” It felt like he was talking directly to me. I turned around and heard him continue: “You’re not going to open a success-oriented book and find a chapter on how getting hammered a few nights a week is the proven path to achievement.”
That moment changed me. I quit drinking that day—and didn’t touch alcohol for the next 5 years, which allowed me to measure the previous 5 years in comparison. Many people can drink casually and still thrive. For me, it was different. As Shawn put it to me later: “Life already has enough inevitable obstacles beating us up to climb over and get around. Why create one yourself voluntarily?”
That became a defining moment of power for me—I was masking some pain, but that was a turning point in how I chose to live.
I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
It’s difficult to isolate just one factor, but it’s likely the connection between a lack of diverse direct real estate experience and its impact on cash flow performance—and ultimately, the ability to deliver solid returns on investment. However, commercial cash flow from tenant leasing relies on instilling dependable transactional confidence with tenant legal teams, ensuring timely deal closures and maximizing investor returns over the investment cycle. This misunderstood principle requires a relentless commitment to securing a prompt jurisdictional asset certificate of occupancy to initiate tenant cash flow through early leasing commitments from high-credit tenants. Only by focusing on final tenant occupancy can investment teams learn the right decisions by working backward through the complex stages of real estate, from the end of construction to the earlier stages of development, architecture, acquisition, capital allocation, liability and risk which originate from deal sourcing. Tenant attorneys, as well as lending institutions, are highly sophisticated in assessing real estate risk. Communicating accurately to tenant representatives and attorneys builds trust and instills transactional confidence, rather than fostering uncertainty, which helps close transactions promptly.
Remaining dependent on unreliable outside sources who commonly guess at critical questions in secret, only to uncover the real answers months or years after acquisition, is not a valid investment strategy. It undermines fund performance and results in mediocre investor returns which are dependent primarily on appreciation only. The shortcomings and implementation of poor ideas by outsourced groups are frequently exposed through fundamental checks and balances enforced by regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions. These shortcomings lead to avoidable delays, which, in turn, unnecessarily diminish ROI. The unique systems deployed by the SCE team, integrating in-house expertise in deal sourcing, acquisitions, development, and architecture into a single, integrated investment platform, streamline efficiency in our model.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. If you retired tomorrow, what would your customers miss most?
If I retired tomorrow, I think my customers would most miss the combination of optimistic enthusiasm and strategic discipline I bring to every deal. I’ve always approached transactions with a positive, fact-based creativity—finding solutions that work, but also knowing when to walk away from deals that don’t align with the broader strategy. That’s earned trust.
They’d probably also miss the sense of humor, timing, and genuine interest I bring to relationships. I don’t just want to close deals—I want to see my clients and friends succeed, and I think that shows.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.southerncaliforniaequity.com
- Instagram: @socal_equity
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/socal-equity
- Twitter: https://x.com/socal_equity
Image Credits
Image 1: Redcar Ltd
Image 2: Redcar Ltd
Image 3: Confidential Client
Image 4: Donaldson Plus Architects
