Ben Weprin

Ben Weprin (born June 28, 1978) is the founder and CEO of AJ Capital Partners, a private real estate company based in Chicago, Illinois.

Weprin was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. In 2001, Weprin graduated from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and went on to earn his MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.

In 2008, Weprin founded AJ Capital Partners. Its strategy was to build a portfolio of hotels, resorts and other luxury properties. Its projects have included restorations of existing hotels and development of new properties, many of them located in Chicago. The company’s first investment was in the California-based luxury hotel and resort management company, Auberge Resorts. AJ Capital Partners’ past portfolio includes Isle De France in Saint Barth, sold to LVMH in 2013, The Raleigh in South Beach, Florida sold in 2012 and Hotel Lincoln in Chicago sold in 2015. Weprin’s operating portfolio includes community-based assets which AJ Capital Partners restored and reopened including Chicago Athletic Association and Soho House Chicago, both in his hometown, Malliouhana Hotel & Spa in Anguilla and The Pontchartrain Hotel in New Orleans’ Garden District. Also in his operating portfolio are Calistoga Ranch in Napa Valley, California, WeWork Fulton Market in Chicago, Illinois, Thompson Chicago and Thompson Nashville.

In 2014, Weprin announced the launch of AJ Capital Partners’ proprietary brand, Graduate Hotels, a collection of boutique hotels in university-anchored markets. As of 2017, there are nine hotels in the division located in Athens, Georgia; Tempe, Arizona; Madison, Wisconsin; Charlottesville, Virginia; Oxford, Mississippi; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Berkeley, California; Lincoln, Nebraska and Richmond, Virginia, with the brand's tenth hotel scheduled to open winter 2017 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the first quarter of 2017, the brand announced plans to expand to Seattle, Washington and Bloomington, Indiana by 2018, as well as a partnership with Cornell University to open a location on Roosevelt Island, New York in 2019. The hotel group announced additional plans of expansion to New Haven, Connecticut and Columbus, Ohio in September 2017.

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