Up Close With Joe Greenblatt
Good luck finding Sunrise Management CEO Joe Greenblatt with two feet on the ground. He's 2014 president of IREM, in a year where international growth is a major pursuit. Frequent flyer miles are his currency.
Joe was in Sofia, Bulgaria, this week, where IREM installed 10 new CPMs, including Tishman International's Nikola Ignatoff (right). Sofia Airport Center is a Tishman LEED Gold development. (Extra credit if you knew Sofia is the country's capital.) Joe flew there from Budapest, also for IREM business, after wrapping up the org's five-day Leadership and Legislative Summit in Washington, DC. IREM's more than 18,000 members provide property management in 39 countries.
As Boomers retire, recruiting talent is a concern. However, universities across the country are seeing an uptick in the popularity of real estate and asset management as careers. (And no wonder, if you get to attend Hollywood-like award shows like the San Diego County Apartment Association, which recently honored Joe.) IREM also focuses on sustainability, offering a toolbox for managers who want to bring green practices to buildings that aren't good candidates for LEED—the vast majority of existing buildings, he notes.
Sunrise manages more than 12,000 units in SoCal, NorCal, Arizona and Nevada. The firm's newest market is Las Vegas, adding 1,000 units there in the past 90 days. (We choose to believe they acquired them all in a poker game.) Joe joined Sunrise in 1989 and purchased the company with a few others in 1999. But he got into property management "by chance." He was doing acquisitions for a real estate syndicator when the 1986 tax reform shifted the nature of real estate investment away from tax shelter structures, making his acquisition activities "pretty much irrelevant."
The Sunrise team participated in the 2013 Walk MS for multiple sclerosis, a cause the firm has supported for 17 years. It became personal when Joe's daughter was diagnosed in 2009. Other interests include biking and running, and he calls himself a bit of a foodie. Shaolin shuan fa isn't a dish from Column A (still sounds delicious, though) but a form of martial arts that blends kung fu and karate. Joe's a black belt and says it's taught him patience and the notion that we have to allow ourselves to be bad at something before we can become good at it. (He doesn't advocate using it when a tenant gets behind on rent.)
