I remember going to a holiday party and you think about Philadelphia, I don't know if you all know
Philly but you know we had Blacksteen there, Blacksteen's company tower and Vestance we had
Ken's company, Drannoff was there, PMC, you know, like the Brandy Wine, the Top 5 or 6
Bell peppers and one of the guys came up to me and said man isn't this great, I'm like well
it's great, he's like we can control all of the city and it just again kind of scrapped me in the face
because you know I said to Leslie, if somebody makes a comment, I think that they have no
regards the fact that nobody looks like he is participating in this and so you just decided
collectively we wanted to go and try it on our own and build our own business that had a different
mindset about inclusion. We from the very beginning you know we wanted people and businesses
of color to participate, this is back in 2008 and we also knew that we needed to work in
neighborhoods that were being collected because we saw significant investment going in
certain neighborhoods and zero investment going you know so we frankly went after the two
most difficult aspirations when we started our company but we believe that that is the real gap
that exists, that based on our experience is working with all of these large
developers in Philadelphia so Leslie and I started, Leslie they were actually four of us when we started
and Leslie and I were the only ones to actually quit our jobs though so you can imagine
when we started talking about what our interest would be everybody wanted to split 25%
to 25% to 75% right for people. We said but Leslie and I, those are quit our jobs
but all this not working that was that work so we said well you don't really, we're not
like letting it to leave our work I said well I did and that was the conversation
I with new company I went all that and this is what you know I have a wide vision three kids
and kids ready to one of them you know not far from a couple years away from going to college
and so it was a huge risk to take and so Leslie and I decided that it was best if the two of us
just go at a loan and we started really working on fundamentals in 2008 see I don't know if you
remember but it was terrible time for what I'll feel for real estate development it's when the economy
crashed and it's when really everything shut down we started the business into biob 2008
and by October nothing had looked like you couldn't get anything done and so we spent the next few
months talking to lenders you know we talked to PRF we talked with you name the bank they take us
out to lunch you know really wonderful lunch we did that for about 18 months we just absolutely
no traction it was always a no and so we we were certainly dissolution but what we did I think
that was smart was that we started creating our own milestones of success so the one thing I remember
from the pharmaceutical industry was value was always measured in pharmaceutical industry under
ability to build a pipeline and and so the real estate industry is really not different people
look at you not based on project you have but the pipeline that you have and the projects you've done
and so Leslie and I really focused on how do we build a pipeline with absolutely no money right
which is you know a tall task but it's also it's also a requirement for companies of
palli because we don't come from families well so we have to think about what is the way to do that
one of the first things we did was we went to the school district before the health here they had a
number of properties that time that was for sale and I don't know if you know as an high school
former as an high school on on we high havens seven the main high that property was for sale for
I think $2.7 million it was a full-savvy black it is a turven medicine high school has an incredible
history it used to be an all-wheel high school was around for over 100 years and it educated some
of the police top male athletes elected officials can Fraser from Merk went to medicine high up
he would have become a CEO of Merk you had some Olympians that were there Teddy Ben Pandigras went to
medicine high so really some known people were there medicine I was also known because more people
that went to medicine high diet and be at home in any other high school in the country
so 64 high school graduate from medicine to Vietnam and died and so that was the history that the
neighborhood remember so lesson I said well let's try and buy this property but we can have
any money and so it was the asking price was two million two point seven million we said well it's a
bad economy nobody's building anything let's just give them a price we think we can afford and so
the school just did point and begin it off their books because it was a 500,000 square foot building
where there was significant vandalism there's a lot of drugs going on in that building you know
anytime you would in you have to go in the police escort I mean there was significant meth meth
methadone's activity there was heroin activity I mean it was a drug aid because it's such a big
empty building and so we offered them $600,000 for the public and they didn't know what we're going
to do with it because it took up the whole city block where our plan was being a linear tear down
built community shopping center but they accepted the offer and then lesson I got scared because
we're like okay so they're asking two points seven million the offer six hundred they they
$600 but we didn't have $600 so we started thinking lessons like you know what
the asking for alone that's asking to help us out and so we we were back to the school
district and I said what do you guys need we said well we don't have the 600,000 but we have an idea
to think of work we believe this needs to be a grocery store it was a food desert
when we're going to check this building down we're going to put a grocery store here
and we just don't have all all the elements together to make it work they said well what
do you have we said we can come up with $25,000 and so they said okay they accepted that as a
down payment but they said they had to get it off their books so they took the 25,000
sold us the property and then kept it on and then well they sold it to us but we had a
least tax situation so we're not for their books but they didn't transfer ownership to us until
we were able to get the whole deal done so for $25,000