“Over time, you should have better, cheaper access to capital than your private sector competitors,” Churchey noted.

Rollins agreed: “As a public company, you can execute more efficiently because [you can] walk in with gun loaded [to take advantage of opportunities].”

Moreover, being public allows these companies to interact with an entirely different group of professionals, according to Rollins. “There are a lot of bright people out there who invest in these public companies, and as one of them… we have access to that brain power,” he said.

Yet being public is not without its challenges, all three CEOs agreed. Executives must know their organizations on a very detailed level to be public.

Bayless recalled meeting with a Wall Street analyst as part of the process of taking American Campus Communities public in 2004 as the first student housing REIT. “I’ve never had my lunch eaten like I did that day,” he admitted, referring to the types of questions the analyst asked and the way he “dissected” the financials. “After that, for three and a half months, we dissected our company in ways we never thought of because the market looks at your company in other ways.”