How to Become a Real Estate Developer

It was 26 years ago when I asked myself one question? It was rather challenging back then because there were no funds, only enough to finish engineering school with several student loans and a dream!

How to become a real estate developer?

This question was raised in my mind when my partner and I won the NJIT alumni award for our senior project in 1985. It was the site design for a 13 acre residential subdivision with minimum zoning requirement of one acre lots. After 13 weekends in South Jersey, we manage to situate a cul-de-sac, road. retention basin, and 12-one acre lots including topographical, sanitary and drainage designs all performed on the new versa CADD system.

Computers were hard to come by back then. If you can actually imagine this story, my college only had 25 PC systems for over 8000 students during the transition to personal computing. You would have to punch numeric cards using a type punch machine of such, that’s right one card for each line of programming in Fortran, bundled by rubber band and placed into the alphabet boxes on the wall. An hour later you would return to hope you didn’t mess up a punch to find that your cards didn’t run and the possibility the print out would read error. It wasa like a bar in the computer room stacked 4 deep.

I was fortunate that my partners Dad was an architect and professional engineer who mentored us and taught how to use his new CADD system to engineer a real estate development site. I was so excited so every weekend I would stay at my partners house whose Mom would cook us Italian meals out of this world after 12 hours days. It didn’t matter because I had found a mentor to teach me engineering from the practical perspective. Theory put to action before hitting the streets all wet behind the ears.

I was even more fortunate that my parents understood the computer room chaos and helped me get my first IBM XT with the two floppy drives. It was a grand slam run because I could get my work done at home and did not have to travel and spend enormous hours at school, sleeping in the hallway literally to catch a nap while waiting for the printout with your fingers crossed. I finally installed more chips to reach a whopping 256k and eventually switched in a 20MB hard drive in lieu of the 2nd floppy. Those were the days.

Well let me get to the story which is really about having mentors that give you the ability to mirror and model there steps of success with the objective of preventing you to reinvent the wheel instead of simply following the steps of a successful mentor.

During the last 26 years, I have given the opportunity to be trained and work alongside of the largest developers in the world. Sometime I take for granted the projects that I have managed to complete because I’ve always done BIG projects from my internship for the New York and New Jersey Port Authority in the World Trade Center in 1983 and thought figured this was routine.

The standards around me were always high. It was like being in the marines of real estate development being trained and raised in my early years in Lehrer McGovern Bovis, the #1 construction management company in the world, Pete Marchetto, the CEO, my Executive mentor on who I wanted to emulate, John Norris, Olympia York’s legendary Senior Vice President in charge of construction for the Financial District, NYC, Canary Wharf, London who taught me how to build any buildng, Robert Sanna, SVP for Forest City Ratner who put me through all the tests and I thank him because he manages the largest projects in New York City today and his knowledge and training was invaluable. These are the mentors that inspired me to look at the big picture.

During the years I always wanted to know about the civil engineering, building hi-rises and performing real estate development and went to seek an understanding of the process through many more mentors that taught me the ins and out of the details down to the foundation, screws, pipes and finishes, contracts, project management, emotions, life you name it. Then one day it clicked…I can do this with the big boys.

It really comes down to three simple steps

1. Find a mentor that can give you a system to follow because the word SYSTEM stands for Saves Your Self Time Energy and Money.

2. Change Your Belief System – Realize it s easy and you can do it

3. Take wise, calculated and consistent action.

What I’ve done because it’s hard to find someone who’ll will teach you what Donald Trump doesn’t want to you know, I’ve combined my knowledge and expertise into a commercial real estate development and syndication system which was used on major NYC projects and my own personal $14.2 million, 90 unit assisted living facility that I developed with NO MONEY. This system can be used anywhere in the world. Why do I say that? “Because New York city is equivalent to playing in an World All Star game of soccer or baseball and if you can perform real estate development in NYC, you can do it anywhere the world”, John Norris said to me at one of many 6 AM breakfast meetings.

In two days I teach you the exact steps on how I found real estate deals, cut through all the theory form New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers College of Engineering and New York University into an executive style system that allows you to succeed in real estate syndication, investment and development. We dissect the real estate development process form finding the project, breaking down the bundle of legal rights, how to make an offer to control property contingent upon approval, conceptual design, funding using investors money, design development, project proposal witting, Finance package preparation, planning board approval, engineering, construction, the entire development
process.

It may sound like a lot to cover, however I want to assure you it’s like the first time you rode your bike or tried on a new pair of shoes. It feels uncomfortable until you break them in or unit you practice riding the neighborhood. Just another opportunity to look at something that can make you money from another perspective. Even if you are a real investor already you or want to learn more about real estate, this is the course for you. Why? Because it teaches you how to think like the big boys from the onset. It stretches your comfort zone, its fun, easy and you leave with a sensory acuity that would have take you 25 years of hard
work and education if you’re lucky.

So remember…LUCK is when preparation meets opportunity!