The other day, while driving to White Plains, NY (shopping mecca of Westchester County), I was almost pushed off the road by a “Wide Load” manufactured home that was en route to its final destination somewhere off of North Broadway. It reminded me of my very first job, when I served as a legal assistant for Brown & Wood, a law firm that had been hired to handle a variety of mortgage- and asset-backed securitization transactions. The bulk of their mortgage-backed business came from The Resolution Trust Corporation, a quasi-government entity that had been set up to deal with the aftermath of the Savings & Loan crisis in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. As luck would have it, one of the non-RTC asset classes that demanded significant legal assistant coverage was in the Manufactured Housing sector. And so began my career of handling somewhat unpopular yet necessary assignments.
I enjoyed working on this program for several reasons – it was kooky, in a way, and the associate whose job it was to delegate menial administrative tasks to me was actually a wonderful guy, incredibly smart, and moderately quirky. He admitted to me at one point that when he got married (in his apartment), they needed a witness, so the doorman from his building stepped in. One thing I learned during my tenure as the “Manufactured Housing Contract Specialist” was that our client, Clayton Homes, which at that point was more or less a one man show, had made an awful lot of money fabricating mobile homes and then lending to the buyers. It was a similar concept to what automobile companies were doing – profiting from the sale and the financing. By securitizing his contracts, Clayton could free up capital to make more loans. He was minting money, but he was also helping people achieve the dream of homeownership.
As my career moved toward Commercial and Corporate Real Estate, the plum assignments kept coming in. Property Manager of a building in the Garment District (before it was cool to be in the Garment District) comes to mind as one of the nastier roles I filled. Between the asbestos-laden restaurant space on the ground floor and a client who was less than interested in spending money to fully comply with local laws, this project generally sent Property Managers (including me) running for the door within a year or two. In my next position, at a different company, I was charged with managing the rolling of leases for a large magazine publishing company. Sure, we (at the time) owned such properties as Modern Bride, New York Magazine, and Seventeen, but those were not under my jurisdiction! Instead, I spent my days slogging away at renewals for American Hog Farmer, Beef, Waste Age, and Apartment Guides from here to the west coast. Interestingly, on a trip to Peoria, IL to visit one of our owned sites, I discovered that Shotgun News kept its guns in a closet adjacent to the storage space utilized by Quilting Magazine. Who knew that such varied interests could share office space and services so easily?! At one point, we were endowed with the responsibility to sell all owned Real Estate to free up capital for acquisitions and paying down of debt. The powers that be were intent on getting top dollar for every sale. One of our properties was located in Clarksdale, Mississippi. I received a call shortly after we began advertising it. Our broker in New York directed me to the front page of The New York Times, which showed a picture of President Bill Clinton visiting Clarksdale, Mississippi – on his whistle-stop tour of the ten poorest counties in the country. OK, so we might have trouble finding a buyer for this one.
Most recently, I had the opportunity to assist a professor from Columbia Business School in writing a case study for the Real Estate Department. I was thrilled to be a part of this experience, especially because the cases had been so fascinating when I had been a student 15 years prior. But I should not have been surprised when the topic was revealed: Restructuring A Construction Loan for Self-Storage Development. I must say, I had very little knowledge at the start with regard to the self-storage industry, but I quickly became an expert (of sorts). As I came to find out, this industry has shown enormous growth in the past decade. There appear to be a number of factors that have influenced this growth, including the increased fluidity of people and businesses across the United States, and the resulting need for temporary storage that accompanies transience. Storage space is also generally cheaper than office or residential space, and the units built today are climate-controlled and provide convenience and other amenities geared specifically to storage needs. I might also argue that Americans have more “stuff” now than they used to, partly due to China’s willingness to manufacture pretty much anything in large inexpensive quantities, and we simply must not deny ourselves anything we desire, and partly due to the “manifest destiny” of cheap storage space – “if you build it, they will come.”
So there’s my career in a nutshell. It has thus far provided a few funny anecdotes, a way to pay for my student loans, wedding and housing, but most importantly it has helped me to meet some of the most loved and influential people in my life while enabling me to hone my management, financial, organizing and writing skills. I can only imagine what is next - although it almost certainly will not be glamorous.
