BJ Kuula and Mike Paulus Launch Kinect Real Estate Partners to Bring Institutional Deals to Private Wealth

Photo Courtesy of Kinect

For most of the last two decades, BJ Kuula built apartment buildings for institutions. Now he wants to sell the same deals to financial advisors’ clients, too.

Kuula is the co-founder and managing partner of Kinect Real Estate Partners, a new investment platform formed in 2025 alongside longtime collaborator Mike Paulus. He is also chief executive officer of American Capital Group, the Bellevue, Washington-based multifamily developer, where he has worked and been a principal for the past two decades, according to his professional biography. That dual role is the point: Kinect does not have its own design teams, construction crews, property managers, or asset managers. It leverages ACG’s platform, which the firm says has delivered more than $4 billion in real estate built or acquired across 86 communities and 23,000 units since 1987.

A Platform Built on Two Decades of Groundwork

Kuula’s biography credits him with roughly $2 billion in real estate development, $1.5 billion in value-add acquisitions, and nearly $4 billion in real estate finance work over his career, spanning design, development, construction, acquisition, property management, asset management, and finance. In 2021, GlobeSt.com named him to its Top 50 Under 40 list in commercial real estate, recognition that predates Kinect by four years and belongs, strictly speaking, to his ACG track record rather than the new firm. Kinect is where that record gets repackaged for a different kind of investor.

Paulus, Kinect’s co-founder and co-managing partner, has worked alongside Kuula on real estate investments for close to a decade, according to the firm. Where Kuula’s public profile has centered on ACG’s operating side and institutional LP Equity fundraising , Paulus has focused on the private wealth capital-raising work that Kinect is now built around. Together, they founded a firm whose core product, in a sense, is access: access for registered investment advisors, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals to deals that have historically gone to private equity firms, pension funds, and insurance companies.

Why Kinect, Not Just ACG

The distinction between the two firms is more than a branding exercise. ACG designs,develops, builds, acquires, and manages the properties. Kinect is the investment vehicle that lets outside private capital into those deals, structured with what the firm calls institutional-grade reporting and governance. It is a common ownership arrangement, not a joint venture, and Kinect describes ACG as a built-in operating partner rather than a third-party relationship that it has to coordinate on a deal-by-deal basis.

ACG has already attracted project-level co-investment from firms including Blackstone, PGIM, Canyon Partners, Clarion Partners, Artemis, New York Life, Hartford HIMCO, according to the company, representing more than $1.3 billion in collective institutional equity deployed. Kuula’s outside commitments follow a similar thread of staying power: he sits on the board and executive committee of the Boys and Girls Club of Bellevue, where he leads the Revenue Development Committee, and he is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Diego and an MBA from the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Paulus frames the pitch to investors in terms of access rather than novelty. “As private markets continue to become an increasingly important part of investor portfolios, advisors and investors are looking for greater access to high-quality opportunities backed by experienced operators. By combining a disciplined investment approach with ACG’s operating platform, we believe that the Kinect platform can provide the private wealth channel with access to compelling opportunities and a differentiated approach to value creation,” said Paulus.

Kinect’s near-term test of that pitch is already underway. The firm closed its second fund, Kinect Opportunity Fund II, at $126.5 million in June, and is preparing to launch a third vehicle tied to a single opportunity zone development outside Portland, Oregon. Both will be judged less on Kuula and Paulus’ individual résumés than on whether the deals perform as ACG’s did for institutional partners over nearly four decades.

What Kinect is ultimately testing is whether that four-decade record travels to a new kind of investor. Institutional partners have had access to ACG’s execution for years. The question Kuula and Paulus are now answering is whether private wealth investors, who write smaller checks and expect different reporting than a pension fund does, get the same results, and whether that is enough to justify building a second firm around it.