They grew up together, worked alongside each other in their first jobs, and when it was time to create their own company, the Welch brothers say the shared experience helped build what is now a real estate operation valued at 13 billion Canadian dollars.

"Looking back, we are both very fortunate. We had a couple of jobs early on, and it set our mindset," said Blair Welch, who, along with his brother Brady, are founding partners of Toronto-based Slate Asset Management, a global investment and asset management firm.

These days, the Slate empire includes 13 offices across North America and Europe with a platform that invests in equity across all real estate classes, provides real estate credit and has expanded into infrastructure.

Last year, Slate pulled off one of its biggest deals ever with a CA$518 million transaction that promises to turn 725 of 800 acres on Lake Ontario owned by steel giant Stelco into one of the largest industrial parks in the province, with up to 12 million square feet of space.

The pair made their first move into Hamilton last year, buying a two-building condominium that took them back to their roots in nearby Burlington, about 60 kilometres southwest of Toronto.

The Welch brothers credit much of their success to learning from two future American billionaires who started Lone Star Funds and Fortress Investment Group, firms they were able to join as they were just starting their careers.

Blair and his brother Brady Welch grew up in a real estate family in Burlington, with a population these days of about 200,000 and within the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

Their father was a local developer, and while they were surrounded by real estate talk at the dinner table, at the time neither planned to follow in their Dad's footsteps.

Brady, the older of the pair, went to university first, but jobs were scarce when they both graduated in the early 1990s.

"When we graduated, it was a pure-on recession," Brady said. Real estate "was a place not attracting institutional capital."

They both got jobs at a joint venture being led by John Grayken, chairman of Lone Star Funds, as it was acquiring and resolving nearly 1,300 bad bank assets that were impaired from the U.S. savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s.

Grayken, who Forbes estimates has a net worth of US$6.3 billion, had come up to Canada to buy a bunch of bad loans from a Canadian trust company.

"They needed people, and Blair and I had just graduated school, knew something about real estate, and it only makes sense now looking backward," said Brady. He added they learned issues like valuing the collateral on loans and deciding whether to foreclose, restructure or sell the loans.

"We watched Grayken and his team build that amazing platform," said Blair. "We were there when it started."

Brady said the ability to learn from Grayken on how to value property assets when things were really bad taught them a lot.

"We were selling apartment buildings at 10 caps," he said. "You couldn't even lease some stuff. It was a complete wipe-out, with no one providing capital on the debt or equity. But [Grayken] understood real estate would never be worth zero."

The brothers found themselves working together again in 1998 when they went to New York to work for Wesley Edens, who had just co-founded private equity firm Fortress Investment Group. Edens is now worth about US$3.5 billion, with assets that include the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks, while Fortress has US$45.8 billion under management.

The brothers were among the earliest employees at Fortress, Brady said. Edens "was smart with math and could see [arbitrage] and credit [opportunities]. So we learned a whole other mindset from him," Brady said.

Blair and Brady founded Slate Asset in 2005. The pair took everything they learned from Edens, Grayken and John Schreiber, a co-founder of Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, and other peers at Blackstone and used the model to expand their own company. Blackstone was a partner on one of Slate Asset's first real estate deals.

"We looked at how they dealt with people and tried to turn that into Slate's culture," said Brady. "Those experiences influenced us because we were there at the beginning. We knew Blackstone because we did deals with them at Fortress."

Blair echoes the lessons from those early jobs, learning about risk and selling your vision to investors.

"You learn to be thoughtful and trust yourself and be able to take calculated risks and believe in your team," said Blair. "Brady and I, from how we were brought up, believe that the only thing you can't teach someone is their effort and their attitude."

The flat organizational structure Slate Asset has today is based on those experiences, said Brady. Slate Asset has about 180 employees.

"I could go talk to Grayken as a young kid about a US$5 million or US$10 million deal, and he would talk to me about it and go sit down with me. I'll do the same thing today," Brady said, noting it was Blackstone's Schreiber who said when a deal is happening, you bring everybody in the firm into the room.

"Everybody from the junior person to the most senior because you know how you learn? By listening to other people. I'm a 50-year-old something white guy, and I'm trained to think a certain way. Someone 25 might think of something different," Brady said.

Blair agrees and says the diversity of thought gets you out-sized returns. "You do what everyone else does, and your returns gravitate to the mean," Blair said.

The pair have no other siblings, and people always ask them how they work together. Blair says being brothers has helped.

"We have been in lots of situations together in work and life," Blair said. "I won't do something if he doesn't want to do it."

Everyone in commercial real estate had to start somewhere. CoStar's First Job column explores where careers began.