I grew up in the real estate business before I knew what real estate was.
My father was a real estate attorney who became a developer, not exactly by plan. The developers he worked with had legal knowledge and a lot of money. He had the legal knowledge. So he got some loans, bought a few buildings in Tribeca, and converted them into what we now call condops, a hybrid of condo and co-op that was pretty unusual in the early 80s, especially in a neighborhood that wasn’t yet Tribeca.
Dinner table conversations in our house were about tenant-landlord relations and condo board disputes. That was my early introduction to the industry.
When I graduated from the University of Hartford in 1996, I moved to Naples, Florida. The real estate section of the Naples Daily News was bigger than the New York Times real estate section. That was the only signal I needed. I packed my car and drove south.
I got my real estate license, started sitting open houses for brokers, and quickly realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I wanted was to be in the construction game. All that farmland being cleared was ripe for development, and I could see what was coming.
Through a connection, I ended up working for a second-generation Italian family running a stucco, drywall, and EIFS business. I grew that operation from about 45 employees to over 180. Not through some complex strategy, just by implementing structure and basic planning in a business that was shooting from the hip.
After a decade in Florida, I came back north, got connected to the Alexico Group, and spent years working on some of New York City’s most prominent development projects. Those years shaped how I think about integrity, detail, and accountability.
Today, Real Property Consulting exists to give property owners the same level of expertise and oversight, whether they’re building ground-up in Manhattan or rehabilitating a multifamily property in South Florida. The work is never glamorous, but when you do it right, the results are very satisfying.
