The Missing Middle in Real Estate Development | Why Most Landowners Lose Money

Share via:

Subscribe via:

In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Q Edmonds interviews Eugene Gershman, a Real Estate Development Manager. Eugene shares his journey from a construction family to becoming a development manager, highlighting the complexities of real estate development and the importance of relationships in business. He emphasizes the need for continuous learning and curiosity in the industry, as well as his aspirations to be a go-to resource for landowners considering development. The conversation is rich with insights on personal growth, the intricacies of project management, and the value of authentic relationships in business.

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Eugene Gershman (00:00)
There are a lot of owners, individual owners, or maybe small family groups that have land.

that could be developed into a good townhouse development or apartment building or a subdivision, but they have no experience doing that. And in their mind, the world is split into, my God, development is extremely complicated. I’d rather sign up for NASA and fly to the moon than try to develop my little piece of real estate. And then there’s this other group that says,

You guys are idiots. How hard can it be? I’ll hire an architect, I’ll hire a contractor and we’ll get it done. And when I saw that, I saw this incredible opportunity that there’s a missing piece in this puzzle.

Quentin (02:20)
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. I’m excited to be here today. I have another fantastic guest. I’m going to get a chance to peek through his lens. And listen, I love this gentleman. I love his official name, official title, right? Real Estate Development Manager. Right? But don’t let that fool you. Don’t let that fool you because this guy is so much more. He’s going to get into that, but…

Eugene Gershman (02:43)
That’s right.

Quentin (02:49)
I love the way he’s building his brand. I love the way he’s building his business. And I love the way that he’s helping people build their and develop their business. And so I’m excited to introduce you all to Mr. Eugene Gershman. Mr. Eugene, how you doing today,

Eugene Gershman (03:05)
Excellent. Excellent. Thank you, Quentin. Pleasure being here. Thanks for having me here.

Quentin (03:08)
Absolutely, man. Glad to have you on. I know this is going to be good for our listeners. Listen, this is going to be good for me. I got my pen ready. I’m going be taking a bunch of notes. And so let’s do this. I want to dive right in. I want you to tell the people what your main focus is these days. Also, if you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got the ball rolling, how you got to where you are now. We love origin stories. And then if you don’t mind, tell us where you are geographically, man. We love to know where you are in the world and what markets you’re serving.

And so, Mr. Eugene, sir, you have the floor.

Eugene Gershman (03:40)
All right. Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks again. I’m very excited to share my story. So Eugene Gershman, I run GIS companies, which is a development management firm. Grew up in a construction family. My dad was a builder. It was a general contractor growing up. I early on decided that I’m not going to join family business, whatever, no matter how badly they ask. This is not for me. He was always angry. He was always stressed out. Construction was always difficult. And I’m like, no, I don’t want to do.

Sure enough, once I got done with my education, got my college degree, worked a little bit for a finance firm, went back got my MBA, my dad calls me, he’s like, hey, I’ve got this project. Do you mind looking at it for me? Since you know the numbers and it’s like, you know, this is a business complex thing, more your thing than mine. I’m like, sure, send it. I looked it over. It was an investment opportunity where he could expand his construction company and also start participating in development projects.

So I looked at the numbers. said, well, look, I’ve never done this before, but the numbers look good based on my schooling. And so he’s like, all right, cool. Well, I’m going to meet with these potential partners. Do you mind joining me at a meeting? Because you kind of know this stuff. You’ve looked at the documents. Maybe you could help me ask some questions. So I’m like, sure, I’ll join you. We joined the meeting. More questions followed. Another meeting, another set of document exchanges. A few months later, he’s like, all right, well, I guess we’re going to do it.

Quentin (04:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eugene Gershman (05:55)
We’re going to set up a branch of our company and I’m going to have to hire a bunch of people. He goes, I wish I just had somebody that I could trust. I’m like, okay, okay, fine. So, so he totally conned me into joining the family business. And you know, next thing I know here we are 25 years later, almost ⁓ he’s ⁓ pretty much retired. He’s inactive and we transitioned our company from being a general contractor to real estate developer.

to then we shut down our construction division and became a full-time development manager. What that means is that we are no longer developing only our own stuff. We actually work with other owners and investors to help them develop properties. And what I realized is that this market is so fragmented. There’s a lot of these infill builders

that development build on spec on their own. And there are these giant, you know, billion dollar development funds who develop these, you know, huge projects towers and, you know, a hundred, 200, 300, $500 million projects, a billion or more. And

are a lot of owners, individual owners, or maybe small family groups that have land.

that could be developed into a good townhouse development or apartment building or a subdivision, but they have no experience doing that. And in their mind, the world is split into, my God, development is extremely complicated. I’d rather sign up for NASA and fly to the moon than try to develop my little piece of real estate. And then there’s this other group that says,

You guys are idiots. How hard can it be? I’ll hire an architect, I’ll hire a contractor and we’ll get it done. And when I saw that, I saw this incredible opportunity that there’s a missing piece in this puzzle.

There’s so much land that could be developed. There’s so many opportunities, but most people either lose a ton of money because they don’t know what they’re doing or they sell to developers who then turn around and make a ton of money and they’re left with the

fair market value of their land before the development happened. And so that’s exactly the the bridge that we’re trying to gap. The gap that we’re trying to bridge.

Quentin (08:26)
and

the captain try to bridge. I’m always, I’m always, I got to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Man, Eugene, thank you, man. You know, as you was talking, I was writing down kind of like your resume in a sense, right? Like, and thank you for taking us through the journey, walking us through the origin story to where you are now. And I I wrote down, you know, family of builders, you know, you got a ton of resources at your hand. Got your MBA.

Eugene Gershman (08:31)
You

Quentin (08:56)
Dad called to ask an opinion. And then dad was like, can you join the meeting? And I love how you put, I actually wrote down and dad called them and said, work for the business. I love it. But man, this, I have a saying that I say probably every podcast is that destiny has no wasted moments, right? So no matter what we go through in life, these moments kind of build us up to where we are now.

It’s like these little fragment pieces that make the beautiful mosaic, right? And so now, you you put the GC part aside. Now, you know, you’re developing. It’s like, dad knew a little bit of something that maybe you didn’t know, baby. But I would love to know this journey. What has it taught you about yourself? Like, what has it revealed to you? Has it revealed the work ethic? Has it revealed, you know, consistency? Like, I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but what has this journey revealed about you, ⁓

Eugene Gershman (09:54)
mean, so many things. Development is a very complex game because a

real estate developer is kind of like a… I mean, there’s so many analogies I’ve used before. One analogy I use is like a conductor of an orchestra where you can have a hundred people sitting in front of you, each playing their own instrument. If you take one instrument out, the symphony is not going to sound the same. But if one instrument is out of sync,

Quentin (10:53)
Mmm.

Eugene Gershman (10:58)
the symphony is not going to sound the same. And conductors job is to make sure that that beat is, ⁓ you know, the clock is ticking right and everybody knows when they’re supposed to play their part and what part they’re supposed to play. It doesn’t mean that the conductor knows how to play a violin, but they have to know what violinist does and at which time they have to chime in. So it’s very similar to what we do. I don’t…

Quentin (11:10)
Yeah.

Eugene Gershman (11:28)
know how to engineer a structure. I mean, I’ve seen enough structures out there that I could have an opinion that I could ask questions that could maybe trigger some additional thoughts. But I’m not going to pretend that I know how to design a building. not an architect. I’m not a designer. I know what I like and what I don’t like. But ⁓ there’s so many different parts. A contractor would come in and look at the set of plans.

and ask questions that could completely change the direction of the design. Because they could say, they could look at something and say, well, why do we have to do it like that? If your objective is this look and feel, we could do it this way and it’s going to cost less money. I don’t know what questions to ask necessarily or what needs to be done, but I know that I need to bring that person to the table.

And so, and that’s where it becomes very important. I have to bring in real estate experts, finance experts, design expert, engineering experts, construction experts. And then construction breaks down into like 17 different categories from dirt guys to tile guys to plumbers, you know, to everybody else. So there’s ⁓ all of these little pieces that what I know now, I wouldn’t have known when I first started. And that part…

Unfortunately, it’s not really being told in ⁓ schools, universities. It’s one of those things. mean, there are real estate programs, there are real estate development programs, but until you live through the cycle and you have to live through the full project cycle from the very beginning until the very end to get that sense. And unfortunately, in this business, you have to make a lot of mistakes to learn. And those mistakes cost a lot of money.

And so that’s part of what I do and I, sorry, I forget your original question. Because I went on a tangent.

Quentin (13:25)
Oh, but you nail it, but

you nailin’ it, man. Yeah, you nailin’ it, yeah.

Eugene Gershman (13:31)
So, but yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at is that it’s so complex and there’s so many moving pieces that, you know, it takes time, it takes experience and it takes ⁓ lots of mistakes to ⁓ learn and overcome to know how to do it right. And ⁓ hopefully I can educate others and help others ⁓ grow in this industry.

Quentin (13:56)
Absolutely. So the question was kind of what you have learned about yourself through this journey. And what I synthesize you saying is you learn how to be a conductor, man. You’ve learned how to how to help the orchestra play the right notes and actually blend together. And so it’s interesting because I always say uniform unity and uniformity are two different things. Uniformity is everybody doing the same thing all at once. Right. So uniformity is all of us hitting the symbol. You know, everybody hitting the symbol. But no unity is when

People do different things, but with the common goal of moving something forward. And that’s what it sounds like to me, you as the conductor, you can say, hey, you do this tile, pavement, whatever, engineer, lighting, whatever, but all the beautiful notes are going to come together to present the development that we want. And so that’s what I hear you learned about yourself.

Eugene Gershman (14:47)
Right. And that’s a very good way of ⁓ describing it. But I think one key addition to that is what I learned mainly is that I need to keep in mind that no matter how much I learned,

there’s still stuff that I don’t know. And what is very important in this industry is to keep asking questions and keep relying on people that have been doing it for a long time.

Quentin (15:46)
Beautiful.

Eugene Gershman (15:56)
keep bringing all kinds of specialists together and keep asking questions because every day things come up that I’m like, I didn’t know that. Or sometimes even if I did, I might have overlooked it because there’s so much information and no AI can help us with that because new things pop up all the time and we have to be cognizant of the fact that we might have missed something.

Quentin (16:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Man, ⁓ man, I gotta write that down. I think that’s good for me. Cognizance of the fact we may miss something. Man.

That was good, sir. I appreciate you saying that, man. And I think that’s such a good position to be in forever learning, forever curious. Like that’s my word for 2026, is curious, right? I want to be curious about everything. What makes me upset? What makes me happy? Why? You know, I choose to do the things that I do. So I think that state of curiosity always can keep you in a place of forever learning. And so I think so eloquently said, being cognitive of the fact we may have missed something. I love that, man.

So let me ask you, Mr. Eugene, what is the next real goal for you? What are you looking to solve a scale next?

Eugene Gershman (17:09)
What I really want to be known as or thought of is ⁓ when somebody wants to or considers doing something with their piece of land, I just want them to think of ⁓ me or my company. if nothing, I don’t necessarily want them to call and hire me, but just it’s kind of like when you think of buying a home product, you think of Home Depot. You’re like, I got to go to Home Depot, pick up some things.

Quentin (17:14)
Mm-hmm.

Eugene Gershman (17:38)
That’s the ambition that I would like to pursue for anybody who owns land. If they’re thinking of developing, I want them to first check out what we think, ⁓ what resources we have. We’re building this ⁓ knowledge base on our website right now to just explore and see if this is something that ⁓ they could do on their own and what their options are. And really, there’s a ton of fee-based developers out there. You can hire a lot of consultants who could help you with that.

My goal is to work with individual owners and I want them to know that there is a resource available for them.

Quentin (18:15)
Absolutely.

I love it, Again, man, you’ve given me so many nuggets. keep just writing down. You say something in the sparks and I’m just writing down. So I appreciate all the nuggets you’ve given. And so you want to work with owners, have a deep relationship of builders within your family. I love the fact just, you you talk about being the conductor. So all of these things make me think of one word, relationships, right? And I would just love to know from your perspective.

Is building relationships and business important? How do you go about doing it? Has it served you well? So if you don’t mind talking to a little bit about relationship and relationship building.

Eugene Gershman (18:58)
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that’s key. I mean, this is one of the main reasons why I am doing podcasts and why I have a social media presence is I want to be relatable. I would like to share as much information as I possess to help others learn. you know, before we jumped on this recording, I had a new client meeting. First time we met.

And we are discussing their project and he’s asking me, well, what is your process? What’s next? And I’m like, look, man, there’s nothing next. Let’s talk again. Well, let’s talk again tomorrow. Let’s talk again next week. Bring in your partners, bring in your coworkers. I don’t want to sell you anything until you’re comfortable with me and I’m comfortable with you. And that’s how I answer your question about relationships is that

Quentin (19:35)
Mmm. Mmm!

That part.

Eugene Gershman (19:54)
I don’t want to sell you stuff that you may or may not need. I would like to work with you and whether it’s me personally or somebody in my team, we need to be able to have a conversation. You should be comfortable picking up the phone and calling me anytime of the day or night, ⁓ weekday or weekend. If there is something that concerns you, that’s what matters to me. When it’s…

too institutionalized, too, I don’t know, too cold. It just, it never ends well because it doesn’t matter how many contracts you signed. If you don’t have that relationship, something’s always gonna break somewhere. And especially in construction where, I mean, emotions fly high. You’re dealing with, especially when the construction starts, you’re dealing with a…

Quentin (20:27)
Yeah, I hear you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Eugene Gershman (20:52)
with a lot of stressed out and angry dudes. ⁓ when, I mean, your materials didn’t get shipped on time. Your cost of lumber went up. Your, I don’t know, your architect forgot to include a detail of something or other or miscalculated something. I mean, people get angry at each other all the time and start pointing finger. If you don’t have that relationship, I always say,

Quentin (20:55)
Yeah.

Eugene Gershman (21:20)
I want to work with people that I can be comfortable going out for beers at the end of the day and talk about religion and politics and not be mad at each other.

Quentin (21:28)
⁓ I love, ⁓ well, that’s a great litmus test right there, Yeah. ⁓ No, but if you can effectively do that and not be mad at each other, you do know that’s a good healthy relationship. Now, I love that. Yeah, I often say relationships are a community and community is common unity. Again, people doing different things, but the common goal, we understand what the common goal is. Healthy, healthy relationship.

healthy interaction, and I believe relationships, two words that I use when I talk about relationship building, is authenticity and being organic. If I present to you my authentic self, give you the chance to really know me, to really give the choice of, can I be in real relationship with this person? And then after that, growing it organically and honestly. And so, you hit on so many key points, and I think that was a great lit- lit- lit- lit- lit- lit- lit- lit-

Yeah, this is a pretty good relationship. Man, Eugene, man, I appreciate you so much. Listen, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Eugene Gershman (22:30)
Right?

Absolutely. I’m all over social media. LinkedIn is my main channel. Look me up, Eugene Gershman. I think I should be the first one that pops up. ⁓ other than that, we’ve got what meta? So Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, eg_developer. Look me up, connect with me, follow me. I post almost daily. But ⁓ if you’re looking for resources that you could read up on today,

Quentin (22:52)
Yeah.

Eugene Gershman (23:13)
please visit our website, GIScompanies.co. No, I’m in there. GIScompanies.co. If you own the land and want to consider developing it, we have a free download. It’s called the Real Estate Feasibility Study Checklist. So can download the checklist and go through the steps. If it helps you in your development journey, I would be very happy about it. If you feel like it’s a bit too much and you would like our help,

but please reach out and we’re happy to help. And finally, check out my podcast, Real Estate Development, Land to Legacy, where I bring in guests and we talk about all kinds of crazy things that we have to deal with. We have developers, we have lawyers, we have designers, investors, syndicators, all kinds of, and we talk about different products too. My expertise is mostly multifamily. I recently talked to a couple of dudes that own mobile home parks.

Quentin (24:10)
Yeah, mm-hmm.

Eugene Gershman (24:11)
And I’m like, cool. never knew much about them. So I got educated. So hopefully it’s useful to others as well.

Quentin (24:19)
Absolutely, man, Eugene. So allow me to say three things to you. First, thank you for your time, right? You could have been anywhere in the world, but you’re here with us. So I value that. Thank you so much for your time. Two, man, thank you for your story. Thank you for presenting yourself as authentic. Thank you for presenting yourself with just integrity, man. Like I tell people all the time, stories have a way.

They plant something in us. never know what is going to grow, but stories plant something in us. And we borrow from different people’s story and it becomes part of our own. then before we know it, it can become integrated into us. And so I just believe you just sow fantastic seeds for people with your story. So thank you for that. Lastly, thank you for your perspective. Thank you for your mindset, man, and bringing that mindset to this platform. I really appreciate that. This was good, man. I appreciate you,

Eugene Gershman (25:16)
Thank you so much. Thanks for the kind words and it’s been absolute pleasure talking to you.

Quentin (25:20)
Absolutely. So listen, y’all heard Mr. Eugene, look in his show notes, get in contact with him, connect with him, but definitely make sure you are subscribed here. Cause I say it all the time and I keep telling y’all, call me out when it happens. We’re going to, if it doesn’t happen, we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Eugene. And we’re going to keep doing it time after time after time. So sir, I say thank you again and everyone else, please have a fantastic day.

Tags:

Investor Fuel

The Missing Middle in Real Estate Development | Why Most Landowners Lose Money

Show Summary

Resources and Links from this show:

Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

Tags:

Ready to take your business to the next level? Take the next steps below