In Chapter 6 of 14 in his 2012 interview, real estate development executive Brett Goldman answers "What Do You Enjoy Most About What You Do in Your Real Estate Career?" Goldman shares a big picture view of how long-term deals begin adding up and defining his career path.
Brett Goldman is a Real Estate Acquisitions Director at Triangle Equities in New York City. He holds a BA in General Studies from the University of Michigan and a Masters in Real Estate Development from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: What do you enjoy most about what you do in your real estate career?
Brett Goldman: I think that I enjoy the successes. Each deal takes a long time. A short deal would be a year, and a long deal is 8 years, a really long deal is 15 years, you know, and I haven't really been involved in a 15-year deal or even an 8-year deal, but there's a lot of build up in each real estate deal. There's so many different parts that need to go into making it successful, so many different to details. Now I kind of delight in the details to some extent and sometimes it takes away from my ability to deal with the bigger picture but I always kind of bring it back to the bigger picture and say, okay, "well, this is what's gonna get it done," but all the little details are always really necessary. So when you've done all the little details and you've put them all into place and when the big picture kind of comes together and none of those details fail and it actually makes it successful, that's a personal success to me.
Erik Michielsen: How do you celebrate success?
Brett Goldman: I think that I just feel good about myself. To some extent, it's like a notch in my belt, that I've done that. And I'd like to do more and more, I’d like to make more and more notches in my belt, thus more and more successful projects and I'm able to shepherd them.
Erik Michielsen: Where do you find validation in your work?
Brett Goldman: Just from that, from the individual successes. As I said, there's a long work up until a success. A success might be a lease signing, it might be a sale, it might be an approval, it might be a completion of a construction project, it might be a financing. But in each of those cases, there's so many different parts that go into them, you know, there's a lot of different parties out there that can be involved. There's a lot of different strings that you need to pull to get everything together, and then when it comes together, whether it's a big success like a sale or even a small success like a financing, which sometimes can be a big success, but either -- in any of those cases, each of those are kind of milestones and that's where I feel that’s success.