— Ian Bel of Olive Tree Holdings
What does it take to build a real estate platform around the most overlooked renter in America — the essential worker who shows up to teach our kids, care for our parents, fight our fires, and clean our hospitals, but who increasingly can’t afford to live in the community they serve? For more than a decade, Ian Bel has been finding out. As Managing Principal and CEO of Olive Tree Holdings, Ian leads one of the most mission-driven private real estate investment platforms in the country. Under his leadership, Olive Tree has acquired and transformed more than 16,000 units of workforce and affordable housing across nine states, deploying over $250 million in capital expenditures specifically to improve the lives of its residents.
Ian’s path to housing wasn’t accidental. As a student at Binghamton University, he watched landlords take advantage of student renters with poor service and worse living conditions and decided to spend his career proving that real estate could be done a different way. Today, alongside Olive Tree Holdings, he leads Olive Tree Affordable Housing and Olive Tree Ventures, the PropTech investment arm of the firm. He has testified before the NYC Rent Guidelines Board, co-founded the national nonprofit Pay Away The Layaway, and serves as a strategic advisor to several leading housing-adjacent technology platforms.
But beyond the units, the awards, and the policy work, Ian is operating on a thesis that the country hasn’t fully reckoned with yet: that workforce housing isn’t a side category of real estate it’s the foundation of every other industry that depends on essential workers showing up. Including mine.
I sat down with Ian to talk about who actually lives in his communities, why the workforce housing crisis is colliding with the aging crisis, and what comes next.
Tracy Ongena: Ian, most people don’t understand the difference between affordable housing and workforce housing. Why does that distinction matter?
Ian Bel: Affordable housing typically refers to subsidized housing for households earning well below the area median income. Workforce housing serves the people just above that line the nurses, teachers, firefighters, home health aides, hospital staff, and service workers who earn too much to qualify for subsidized housing but not enough to afford market-rate rents in the communities they serve. These are the people who keep cities running. The distinction matters because the policy conversation, the capital markets, and most of the development industry are built around either subsidized housing or luxury product. The workforce in the middle is the most underserved renter in America, and that’s where we focus.
Tracy: Take me back to the beginning. What pushed you to start Olive Tree?
Ian: It started in college. I was a student at Binghamton University, and I watched landlords in the off-campus student housing market take advantage of renters every way they could bad maintenance, bad customer service, bad living conditions. The students didn’t have leverage and the landlords knew it. That stuck with me. When I eventually moved into multifamily real estate professionally, first at One Wall Partners and then in starting Olive Tree, I built the company around a different premise: that you can do well by doing right. The vast majority of workforce renters are good people working hard jobs, and they deserve to come home to a community that respects them. That’s the entire thesis.
Tracy: Olive Tree has acquired and transformed more than 16,000 units across nine states. When you take over a community, what changes from day one?
Ian: First, the relationship between owner and resident changes. We invest heavily in property-level customer service, because most workforce renters have never been treated like customers by their landlord. Second, the physical property changes. Since inception, we’ve deployed more than $250 million in capital expenditures specifically to improve our residents’ living conditions exterior renovations, amenities, safety upgrades, technology, common areas, units. We aren’t trying to push these properties up-market. We’re trying to make workforce communities better workforce communities. Third, we invest in our residents financially through partnerships with platforms like Stake, which lets our residents build cash-back rewards from paying rent on time. The vast majority of workforce renters have never had a wealth-building tool tied to their housing payment. We’re trying to change that.
Tracy: One of the things that drew me to this conversation is that your residents and my caregivers are often the same population. Home health aides are the fastest-growing occupation in America and one of the lowest-paid. They are quite literally the people who keep aging Americans in their homes and they need a place to live to do that. How do you think about the connection between workforce housing and the aging-in-place economy?
Ian: It’s something we think about constantly. The entire aging-in-place economy home care, home health, geriatric care management, the whole sector depends on a workforce that can afford to live near the people they serve. If a caregiver has to commute 90 minutes each way to reach an elderly client, the math breaks. The client gets less reliable care, the caregiver burns out, and the agency can’t retain talent. Workforce housing isn’t a real estate category it’s the infrastructure that every essential industry, including yours, runs on. The country hasn’t connected those dots yet, but it’s going to have to.
Tracy: You’ve been outspoken on housing policy. What do most policymakers misunderstand about workforce housing?
Ian: The biggest misunderstanding is that you can solve housing affordability by regulating prices without addressing supply. Rent regulation is well-intentioned, but the data shows clearly what happens at the building level: new originations on highly regulated assets have collapsed by more than 70% versus pre-2020 norms. That means owners can’t get new loans to buy or refinance these buildings, capital dries up, and maintenance backs up. The buildings deteriorate. The residents lose. You cannot escape supply and demand by shuffling the cups around. The way to actually solve affordability is to build more housing and to invest in the workforce housing stock we already have. That’s where I spend most of my policy energy.
Tracy: You are an active technologist. What problems are you trying to solve through technology that traditional real estate can’t?
Ian: A few. First, the resident experience most multifamily technology was built for luxury renters and hasn’t been adapted for the workforce market. We invest in platforms that bring better tools to our residents at a price point that makes sense. Second, operating efficiency workforce housing operates on tighter margins than luxury, and the operators who can run cleaner, leaner, smarter operations win. Third, we look for technologies that genuinely improve resident outcomes financial wellness platforms, communication tools, safety and security improvements. We believe that the future of workforce housing is going to be built as much by technology as by capital.
Tracy: You were instrumental in the early days of Pay Away The Layaway, which helps low-income families. What does the philanthropic side of your work teach you about the operating side?
Ian: It reminds me about what our work is all about. Pay Away The Layaway was really the brainchild of one of my best childhood friends but I was fortunate enough to be able to help him grow the platform. It was borne out of the realization that low-income families are often one financial shock away from real crisis a layaway payment they can’t make, a car repair, a medical bill. Those are the same families that, when they rent, live paycheck to paycheck in workforce communities. The nonprofit work reminds me that the people behind the units aren’t statistics. They’re parents trying to give their kids a holiday, workers trying to hold their families together, people who deserve to be seen. When I’m making decisions about our portfolio, that perspective shows up in every choice.
Tracy: What does the next decade of workforce housing look like?
Ian: I think it’s going to be one of the most important asset classes in America and one of the most overlooked. The demographic tailwinds are massive. The country isn’t building enough housing, the workforce is being pushed further from urban cores, essential industries are scrambling for labor, and the aging population is putting unprecedented demand on home-based services that depend on workforce labor. The capital is going to follow that reality eventually. The operators who got there first, who built real expertise in serving this population, and who treated residents as partners rather than transactions those are the platforms that will define the next decade.
Tracy: Last question, what do you want people to know about workforce housing that they probably don’t?
Ian: That the people who live in our communities are the people who hold America together. They get up early, they go to hard jobs, they take care of other people’s children and other people’s parents, and they deserve a community that takes care of them back. Workforce housing isn’t a niche. It’s the foundation. The country runs on it. And the longer we treat it as an afterthought, the more fragile everything else becomes.
About Olive Tree Holdings: Olive Tree Holdings is a mission-driven private real estate investment firm focused on workforce and affordable multifamily housing communities across the United States. The firm has acquired and transformed more than 16,000 units across nine states and deployed over $250 million in capital improvements to enhance the lifestyles of its residents. Learn more at olivetreeholdings.com.
About Alvita Care: Alvita Care is a leading private-pay home care company serving New York City, Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Trusted by Memorial Sloan Kettering and Mount Sinai, Alvita provides home care, private-duty nursing, care management, and bedside care designed to help families navigate aging with dignity. Learn more at alvitacare.com.