Joe Berrada, Billionaire

Tracing the Astonishing Rise of Milwaukee’s Largest Landlord

In commercial mortgage-backed securities issued by three banks throughout late 2024 and 2025, Youssef “Joe” Berrada—by far, Milwaukee’s largest landlord—is reported as having an “approximate” net worth of $1.027 billion and liquidity of $94 million.[i] This is an increase of $72 million from his reported net worth of $955 million shown in prospectuses filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier in 2024.[ii]

The loans were issued to LLCs controlled by Berrada Properties, but Youssef Berrada sponsored and guaranteed them in his own name. This is why the securities filings include his financial disclosures. In a normal mortgage (personal or commercial), the value of the property provides sufficient collateral for the loan. However, the filings explain that “the Mortgagor’s operations do not comply, with all of the separateness covenants required for it to be a Single-Purpose Entity.” The “mortgagor” in that sentence refers to the LLC taking on the loan. In plain English: the operations of Berrada’s various LLCs are connected in a way that might cause a judge to collapse them into a single entity in the event of a bankruptcy. In that sense, investing in this mortgage could expose the investor to risks from other parts of the Berrada business besides this one property. So Youssef Berrada personally commits “to be liable on a recourse basis” should this occur.

The loan documents provide Berrada’s net worth and liquidity as evidence or reassurance of his ability to make good on this commitment. Guarantor financial statistics are usually self-reported by the borrower and are not necessarily subject to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), meaning guarantors have considerable flexibility in how they calculate their own net worth. They might take a more optimistic view when valuing their assets than an auditor would. Still, it is unlawful to misrepresent one’s finances in a securities filing, and there is no reason to believe that Berrada has done so. Rather, what we can say is that, by Berrada’s own apparent estimation, he is a billionaire.

Which brings me to a question: Where is his money from? With only publicly available data, it’s impossible to say if it’s all from his rental business, other investments, or perhaps even family wealth. Nonetheless, Berrada’s property empire has grown prodigiously since he bought his first rental property 30 years ago, with most of the growth coming in just the past decade. My interest here is to try to sketch out the story.

From 8 Units to Ten Thousand

Berrada bought his first apartment building in Milwaukee in the spring of 1996 for $187,000. It’s an 8-unit building on Hampton and 79th. He owns it today (although he sold it in 2008 before buying it back in 2013). Since this initial purchase, the holdings of Berrada and LLCs affiliated with him have grown at an extraordinary clip. As of the end of 2025, I count over 880 apartment buildings holding a total of 10,223 housing units in the Berrada network.[iii]

Most of these properties are in the City of Milwaukee, where Berrada-affiliated companies own 9,720 units. I count 32 apartments across three properties in West Allis and 40 apartments in two St. Francis properties. Berrada also has a considerable presence in Racine, with 441 units in 33 parcels.

When I refer to the “Berrada network,” “Berrada-affiliated companies,” or the like, I mean both properties owned by Berrada in his personal capacity and those owned by LLCs connected to him. Unlike large corporate landlords such as VineBrook Homes or Greystar, Berrada Properties does not sell shares to investors, in either public or private markets. According to a filing from 2024, Berrada Properties was founded by Youssef Berrada and remains “family owned and operated.”[iv] See “Note on Defining the Berrada Network” at the end of this post for more details.

At times, Berrada’s growth has seemed almost exponential. He entered the 2000s with 89 units and ended the decade with 753 owned by him and affiliated companies. At the end of 2019, the Berrada network was roughly the same size as Milwaukee’s public housing authority (HACM), with about 4,200 units in Milwaukee and another 130 in Racine. Already the largest private landlord in the city, the Berrada network more than doubled in size from just 2019 to 2023. Parcel records show that the network acquired nearly 1,000 more units in 2024 and 2025.

Here is some context for just how unusual it is for a landlord to achieve a portfolio of this size, let alone an individual landlord, as opposed to a large corporation. According to this trade organization list, the largest landlord in the country in 2025 was Greystar, with 122,545 housing units owned. The 50th largest landlord on the list was JRK Property Holdings, which owned 25,796 units across operations in 23 states. Berrada’s portfolio of 10,223 units within Milwaukee and Racine counties, in other words, is 40% as large as the 50th largest corporate landlord in the entire country.

Where Berrada is concentrated

Citywide, Berrada-affiliated companies own 6.4% of all rental housing units. Milwaukee contains many rented single-family homes and duplexes, but Berrada specializes in apartment buildings. Among apartment buildings with at least 4 rental units, Berrada owns 10.9% of the housing stock.

The citywide figures obscure the true degree of the Berrada market dominance, because the holdings are concentrated in specific parts of the city, particularly on the far north and (increasingly) near west sides.

The northernmost fifth of the city is where Berrada’s heaviest concentration lies. In the 2nd Aldermanic District, Berrada companies own 24% of all rental units and 44% of rental units in an apartment building. In the neighboring 1st District, the companies own 16% of all units and 32% of apartment units. In the 9th District, Berrada-affiliated companies own 18% of all units and a quarter of apartments.

Berrada companies also own a double-digit share of apartments in the 5th district (16%), the 7th district (21%), and the 10th district (18%).

A particularly large number of Berrada properties are in the 4th District (1,815), but they are concentrated in the western portion of that district, rather than its also apartment-heavy downtown portion.

Only two districts, the 3rd and 13th, hold no Berrada properties.

Berrada’s concentration of property ownership can feel even greater on a block-by-block level. Wells Street in the Concordia neighborhood between 27th and 35th streets is a striking example. That street is a mixture of grand old houses, some now B&Bs, interspersed between mid-size apartment buildings. Berrada made his first purchases here in 2015. Since then, he has acquired more buildings with alacrity. By the end of 2025, his companies owned 17 properties containing 459 apartments just along this 8-block stretch of Wells St.

These acquisitions were part of a broader buying spree across the near west side. Until 2015, Berrada owned no properties at all in this part of the city, which includes the 7 neighborhoods of Avenues West, Cold Spring Park, Concordia, Martin Drive, Merrill Park, Miller Valley, and Piggsville. Berrada-affiliated companies acquired 200 units in 2015 and owned 788 at the end of 2019. By the end of 2025, Berrada’s network owned 74 apartment buildings and 2,265 units on the near west side, equal to 28% of the area’s apartments.

The interactive map below shows the properties owned by Berrada-affiliated companies at the end of 2025. Click to open it in a new tab.

At this scale, the accumulation of wealth is enormous. The 2025 assessed value of all these properties together was around $625 million, but this substantially understates their market value.

I matched 26 individual mortgages obtained by Berrada companies with City of Milwaukee parcel records. Each mortgage covered between 67-168 apartments, and altogether the 24 mortgages refinanced 2,629 units (over a quarter of Berrada’s total). The data come from prospectuses filed in 2024 and 2025. The city assessed the value of these properties as $160.3 million in 2025. However, the appraisals for these properties shown to investors totaled $471.4 million. In other words, these properties were assessed by the city at just 34% of the value at which they were appraised by the market. Some of the appraisals came after the assessment window ended, but some did not. Applying this ratio of assessed-to-appraised value to the rest of Berrada’s properties would suggest a total value in excess of $1.7 billion.

That is the asset side of the business. On the revenue side, the same prospectuses also report the most recent annual effective gross income (EGI) for the properties in each mortgage. Across all 26 mortgages, the average monthly EGI per unit was $1,222. Applying this number to all of Berrada’s properties suggests a gross annual revenue of around $149 million.

What does it mean for Milwaukee (and, to a lesser extent, Racine) for so much property to be concentrated in a single landlord? In the northernmost fifth of Milwaukee, the odds are better than 1-in-4 that Berrada owns any given apartment one might look at.

The decisions Berrada Properties makes about how much rent to charge and how well to maintain its properties shapes the lives of perhaps 20,000 people or more (based on the average sizes of renting households).

Note on Defining the Berrada Network

The Berrada network includes many different LLCs, as well as properties whose owner is listed as Joe Berrada personally. Legally speaking, the LLCs are the owner of each property, while the beneficial owner of the LLC is unknown. But as a practical matter, a connection to Berrada is clear because these LLCs list one of Berrada’s addresses in their corporate registration paperwork or parcel tax records.

To be clear, Berrada isn’t trying to hide the connection. Regardless of the legal owner name, the apartment buildings often have prominent signs reading BERRADAPROPERTIES.com, and many of the LLCs have names like BERRADA PROPERTIES 74, LLC, and BERRADA PROPERTIES 117, LLC. Others have names referring to the apartment complex or a region of the city while using Berrada-linked addresses. For instance, MEAUX PARK, LLC owns 42 parcels on Long Island Drive, directly north of the titular park. Per state filings, the LLC’s principal office is Berrada’s complex at 10136 W FOND DU LAC AVE, and all of the individual properties receive their property tax bills at a Berrada-linked PO Box. A handful of LLCs present close questions, where the connection to Berrada is not entirely clear. In these instances, I have usually erred on the side of removing the properties from my understanding of the network. For these reasons, plus the occasional fallibility of tax rolls, my calculations are my best estimate of the size of Berrada’s network in any given year and may contain some small errors.

To create this analysis of Berrada’s rise, I used the Milwaukee Assessor’s archive of annual property database snapshots, which show the ownership of every property in the city at the end of each calendar year. For properties owned outside of Milwaukee, I used annual vintages of the statewide parcel file. For each year, I identified the addresses used by Berrada and the companies using those addresses. I then manually removed a handful of owners that appeared to be included erroneously, perhaps due to an incorrect parcel record. The final dataset includes more than 250 distinct names, which partly reflects the large number of LLCs Berrada uses and partly the idiosyncratic ways those LLC names are spelled when entered into the parcel database.

[i] Specifically, the documents report “an approximate net worth and liquidity of $1,026,844,321 and $94,434,037, respectively.” A recent example of this language is from WFCM 2025-C65. Youssef Berrada is listed as the guarantor of Loan 18 at A-1-25. Footnote 33 at D-2-33 contains the language about the guarantor’s net worth and liquidity. See also similar statements in BBCMS 2025-C35, BMO 2025-C12, BMO 2025-C11, WFCM 2025-C64, BBCMS 2024-C30, WFCM 2024-C63, and BBCMS 2024-C28.

[ii] See BMO 2024-C9, BBCMS 2024-C26, & BBCMS 2024-C24, which report “an approximate net worth and liquidity of $954,765,140.00 and $95,950,900.00, respectively.”

[iii] These statistics are based on parcel records maintained by municipal assessors. I collected Milwaukee statistics from the city’s Master Property File. For other municipalities, I used the 2025 statewide parcel file, which aggregated files from each county in the first half of 2025. Consequently, the statistics from other municipalities may be missing some transactions from later in the year.

[iv] BBCMS 2024-C24, A-3-109.

Continue ReadingJoe Berrada, Billionaire

In Lubar Center Program, Chief Justice Karofsky Calls for Protecting Judges and the Justice System

Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Jill Karofsky had some friends in the audience when she took part in a “Get to Know” program in the Lubar Center of Marquette Law School on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. There was also someone else with her who sought no attention but was important: a security person. Indeed, to make a point, Karofsky noted the person’s presence.

The point concerned one of Karofsky’s main themes in her conversation with Derek Mosley, director of the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education: the need to increase protection of judges and court personnel at a time when polarization and extremely hateful views are making the possibility of violence more of a concern. In Wisconsin, a retired judge from Juneau County, John Roemer, was murdered in 2022 by a man whom Roemer had sentenced to six years in prison. Karofsky herself was the target of stalking that led to the conviction of a Racine man in January 2026. She said police officers have been stationed outside her house at times. And having security officers around Supreme Court justices has become routine.

“Political violence in the United States is going in the wrong direction,” Karofsky said. “It’s unacceptable.” She said she worries every day about the safety of judges, all other staff people who work in courts, and everyone who comes into contact with the justice system. Karofsky has been urging legislators to increase spending on security for courts. She said only four people are assigned now to work on safety for judges across Wisconsin. “We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of judges,” she said.

She also said it was “completely unacceptable” for the president of the United States to attack justices and judges for doing their jobs. “That’s as un-American as you can get,” she said.

“There are judges and justices in this country who are accessing an incredible level of courage” to do their jobs, Karofsky said. “I think in many ways the judiciary is the bulwark for protecting our democracy.”

But when an audience member asked whether the personal risk meant attorneys shouldn’t aspire to be judges, Karofsky said the value and importance of the work can continue to make it worth being on the bench. More broadly, Karofsky said she encourages people to go to law school and become lawyers. “We need good lawyers in this country right now more than we ever have.”

Among her priorities, Karofsky is pushing to have a policy created for when judges and justices should recuse themselves from taking part in cases, including when one of the parties has been a donor to their campaigns. Karofsky said there is a rule petition in front of the Wisconsin Supreme Court currently. “We’re going to have a rule hearing . . . , and it is my hope and my desire and my plan to work together to craft a rule that is best for the people in this state” by the end of the current court term in June, she said.

Although the partisan split between conservatives and liberals on the Wisconsin high court has received great attention and shaped recent races for the court, Karofsky said the reality of the court’s work is generally much different. “We are far more likely” to have decisions that are 7 to 0 or 6 to 1 or 5 to 2 than 4 to 3, she said. She said the justices work together, socialize together, and take part in events and celebrations outside of work. The idea that the court is split 4 to 3 on everything, “that’s not the world I live in,” she said.

Although she said she does not like the high costs of recent Supreme Court races in Wisconsin, she said that the blame should be put on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which she characterized as opening the way for large donations by corporations and organizations. And she said she continues to support election of judges and justices, rather than appointment through a political process.

Asked by Mosley if she had a message for the law students in the audience, Karofsky said, “We are at a pivotal time in our democracy. And this is a time when the law can really be used as a vehicle to protect the rights of people in our communities, and it can be used as a vehicle to change things that aren’t working for people. I think you are learning how to be lawyers here, and graduating with your law degrees is going to give you incredible power and the incredible opportunity to make a difference in this world are time when we need it most.” Video of the one-hour conversation may be viewed by clicking here.

Video of the one-hour conversation may be viewed by clicking here.

Continue ReadingIn Lubar Center Program, Chief Justice Karofsky Calls for Protecting Judges and the Justice System

Wisconsin School Vaccination Rates: an interactive map

The Washington Post recently published an interactive article which shared kindergarten immunization data collected from public schools in 34 states. The data shows plunging vaccine rates across the country.

I was shocked by how low some of the numbers were, and I wanted to understand how they compared to school numbers as a whole. It’s possible than some kindergartners haven’t yet received all of the vaccination they will receive.

For example, Neeskara Elementary had an MMR vaccination rate of 12% and an overall compliance rate of 7%. Fortunately, the schoolwide numbers for Neeskara, according to WI DHS, are an MMR rate of 60% and an overall rate of 50%. Given that herd immunity against measles requires “about 95% of a population to be vaccinated,” Neeskara is still disturbingly low, but there is a world of difference between 7% and 60%. Most of the children attending Neeskara have received this vaccine–just not most kindergartners at the beginning of the year.

At MacDowell Montessori, kindergartners reported an MMR rate of 26% and an overall rate of 26%. The schoolwide numbers are 92% for MMR and 62% overall. Likewise, kindergartners at Hayes Bilingual School were at 33% for MMR and 27% overall. The schoolwide numbers are 76% MMR and 61% overall.

More details from WI DHS

Besides listing the MMR and overall vaccine compliance rates for each school, the WI DHS data also provides information about why students aren’t vaccine compliant. In most Milwaukee schools with low vaccination rates, the cause isn’t that parents have filled out vaccine waivers. According to the DHS statistics, it’s more common for students who are out-of-compliance to be classified as “in process,” “behind schedule,” or just “no record” rather than having explicitly opted-out of vaccinations by completing a waiver.

At Neeskara, for example, 20% are “behind schedule” and 28% have “no record.” Scarcely any students actually have a vaccine waiver on file. Similarly, Riverside High School has truly dismal 12% vaccine compliance rate. Eighty percent of its students are “behind schedule” and 7% are “no record.” Few, if any, have waived vaccine requirements.

Schools where many students have waived vaccines are uncommon, but they do exist. At Tamarack Waldorf, on Milwaukee’s East Side, 67% of students have met minimum vaccination requirements. Sixteen percent have “waived all vaccines” and 24% have completed a “personal conviction waiver.” The distinction between these classifications is unclear to me. So is the distinction between students who are listed as “in progress” vs. “behind schedule.”

In general, the quality of the school-level data provided by WI DHS raises as many questions as it answers. At North Division, for instance, 65% of students were classified as “met minimum requirements” in 2024, with just 5% having “no record.” The next year, in 2025, fewer than 5% “met minimum requirements” and 80% had “no record.” Absent some extraordinary turnover over students between those two years, I struggle to imagine how this could be possible. More likely: the data was reported incorrectly in one or both of the years.

Many schools also fail to submit their reports every year. In 2025, 377 schools statewide (13% of the total) failed to submit a report. But 197 of those schools had submitted a report the previous year, in 2024.

The current self-reported school vaccination data collected by WI DHS is incomplete and inconsistent where available. The failure to report this data accurately (or at all) poses real challenges to public health efforts. A health department might want to plan its vaccine outreach campaigns around those schools where children are unvaccinated, not because their parents have opted them out of immunizations, but simply because those children are apparently not receiving medical care. Better data would improve this kind of targeting.

I’ve built an interactive map showing the available data for every school in the state. Click the image below to open it. Mousing over each school will reveal its name and 2025 overall vaccine compliance rate. Click the school to display a table showing more detailed vaccine statistics for each year from 2022 through 2025. If the school failed to submit a report in any of those years, all values for the year will be NA.

Updated 2/25 to correctly identify that the Washington Post story uses kindergarten vaccination rates, not schoolwide rates.

Continue ReadingWisconsin School Vaccination Rates: an interactive map
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