Over the course of your life and career, there will be random bits of serendipity that hopefully help shape who you become and where you end up.
Looking back, there are a few of those moments in my own life that remain crystal clear. One of them came in 1998, in the fall of my last year at Pratt Institute.
It was my last year working toward my Bachelor of Architecture degree, and we were all filling up on elective classes. I signed up for Intro to Real Estate, which met on Monday nights at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street, Pratt’s Manhattan campus at the time.
Five years into an accredited architecture program and a few internships later, I still had a pretty unclear picture of what mattered to me professionally, or what I wanted to do with myself. An introductory real estate course wasn’t exactly something I expected to help solve that puzzle.
The professor for that class was Edward Re. He was a funny, quirky architect, with the usual credentials after his name, but that’s not how he came across. The world of real estate as he described it was real life, not architectural theory and what could or should be, but what actually was.
As we learned about real estate, we learned about him: about facilities management, about renovating buildings in the city, and his stories about managing his own properties.
He didn’t carry himself like anyone I’d come across in five years of school, where everybody was very serious and very sure that what we were doing was more important than it actually was (and as always, money was never to be discussed).
I want to be careful here, because I don’t remember a single thing he said. Not one quote. What I remember is the feeling of sitting in that room and hearing someone talk about buildings in terms of what they cost, what they paid him, who owned them, and why.
For the first time, someone was talking about the practical side of the profession. How you actually take care of yourself. How you do the thing you want to do and still make rent. Nobody in architecture school back then talked about that.
Aside from the occasional question, I never spoke to him. Didn’t go to office hours, never introduced myself, nothing. But I sat there and paid attention.
Something opened up in that room that I hadn’t gone looking for, and I couldn’t have told you what it was. The best I can describe it: architecture had been interesting to me for five years, but nothing had grabbed me. This did.
What I took from it was a space where architecture and development weren’t two separate professions, where the person drawing the building could be the person who owned it. I didn’t have a name for it. I didn’t know about John Portman yet, or what the architect-as-developer concept was. I just knew there was a shape there, and I felt I could fit into it.
There’s a side story from that semester I still get a kick out of.
I had a close friend at the time who hadn’t gone to college and had no particular interest in architecture. He was working in construction, and I must have talked about this class enough that he got curious, because one Monday he came with me to the Puck Building and sat in.
Then he came the next Monday. Then he came every Monday for the rest of the semester.
He never registered or attended Pratt. He skipped the exam days, but otherwise he just sat in Ed Re’s class, asked questions, and absorbed it.
Almost thirty years later, he’s still in real estate, and the two of us still joke about it, as the fake student who got more out of that class than most of the people paying tuition.
Apparently, sitting in class wasn’t enough for either of us. By the following summer, we were already trying to buy a building together.
A place on Meeker Avenue near McGuinness Boulevard in Brooklyn.
The owner wanted $210,000. We were at $200,000. We haggled and got stuck over the ten grand like it was the whole deal, and we lost it.
That building is probably worth three or four million today.
But what did we know? Lesson learned, expensively, which is the only way that particular lesson ever gets learned.
Then there was the midterm.
The Midterm project was to find an existing building, propose a renovation, run some preliminary numbers, and see if we could make something work and what it would look like.
We were all architects in training, so the financial analysis was terrible, we were drawing, not underwriting. But that didn’t matter.
My idea was a building near where I lived, on Manhattan Avenue in Williamsburg. Keep it, renovate it, build on top of it, squeeze out and maximize what was already there.
I didn’t understand the numbers. but I put together something that looked like a pro forma and handed it in.
Eight years later, I did that project. That exact building, and we still own it today.
What didn’t I understand back then?
Everything.
Real estate is one of those fields where you don’t really know what you’re doing until you’re actually doing it.
And once you’re in it, you find out you need to be good, not expert, at six or seven disciplines all at once.
Finance, tax, legal, construction, leasing, sales, management.
Pick the one you’re weak in and that’s the one that will smack you first when you’re not looking.
Architecture school taught me how to design. Ed’s class was the first that showed me another way to think.
Professor Re’s class was the first seed.
There would be three or four other seeds planted over the following years, people, experiences, and opportunities that helped shape what I wanted to do and what would eventually become Mortar Group.
But I have to say Ed was the first.
And it all started on Monday nights in a room at the Puck Building, with a guy who was funny, didn’t take the profession too seriously, and who was, it turns out, exactly what he was describing: an architect who owned buildings.
Thank you, Professor Re -
