Real Estate Lab director
A personal story I think people want to hear? Well as it relates to real estate, I would say that real estate has changed everything for me and helped me to learn about investment. I’m from Allentown was born here and investing for me has been a way to improve Allentown, improve the housing stock, help families, and it’s been a life changer.
It’s been a game changer for me and that’s why I’m the director of the Real Estate Lab because I want to teach other people how to do that. Someone once said to me, “You could get anything you want in life, as long as you help enough people get what they want in life.” So, for me, it’s been about providing housing, helping families, and giving them a clean, safe, affordable functional house. It makes the community better and then I teach other students the same.
I went to Lafayette and majored in chemical engineering and Spanish. I lived in Spain for two and a half years and then I was a chemical engineer for 12 years. I was making, starting up, and manufacturing plants as a mid-level manager and I was buying houses on the weekends. I did not have a social life. I recently left to be a full-time real estate investor. While in Spain for my Fulbright Scholarship, I learned and studied business, stocks, equities, and debt bonds.
I wasn’t interested in stocks; they were too abstract for me. But, I understood real estate, which is predictable. I understood buying houses and understood if your income is greater than your expenses, there’s a little bit left for profit and you can keep buying as many houses as you can buy. So that’s why I found real estate business school.
I’m the main credit guy. I improve the students’ credit scores by 40 points in four months, on average. One student didn’t have credit and now he’s at 750, which is the top-tier credit score, and it only took six months.
See, here’s the thing, I’m an engineer and now I do real estate. I firmly believe that if you understand the rules of life, whether it’s like hey, gravity, if gravity makes up go down, or like their chemical engineering principles, thermodynamic s—those principles, apply them to, like, I play instruments, there’s music, there’s lines on a staff, you can play notes, and there’s like keys. And if you play out a key or key signatures and you play the wrong notes, it’s gonna sound bad, but if you play in the right key signature, it’s gonna sound good. Finances do the same thing, if you know the rules of finance, you can play the game.
So, it’s all about knowing the world of credit, and playing to win. If you know the rules, and you know how to use the rules, you can go from no credit to having a 750. So that’s the name of the game. You just have to understand the rules.
Interviewed by Grace Hoffman ’25, Jonathan Lewis ’24, Riley McHale ’24. Photo by Joe Romano ’23
