How Did You Get Your Start?

I ended up at the University of Virginia in 1969 as a government and foreign affairs major. I was much more of a reading and writing kind of guy, so I felt a career in law would be well suited to my talents.

I attended the University of Virginia Law School and therefore stayed in Charlottesville for 3 more wonderful years. I went back to Chicago upon graduation and joined a large law firm. I had no idea what that meant, but from law school, it was what I always imagined doing.

Pretty quickly I came to understand that in a lot of large organizations, there's some challenges to being a 1st year associate. Specifically, the quality of the work I was assigned. At the end of my 1st year, I realized I wasn't making the kind of progress I had wanted to and was asked by a friend at a small boutique real estate law firm if I was interested in joining them.

So, I left “Big Law” after just a year, which was certainly not part of the master plan. The light went on that perhaps life was going to take a different path than I had imagined just a year prior. I stayed at the small firm for 4 years until I realized that I needed to make some mistakes on my own to actually learn.

I left to join Allstate as an in-house lawyer. My real estate investment department colleagues were routinely asking me questions that had nothing to do with the law, but with business matters. Although I reminded them I really wasn't trained to do that, they confirmed my answers were about as good as anybody else's.

I left Allstate when the investment program I was working on was terminated due to a tax law change. I then joined a growing real estate investment firm as the general counsel. After one or two years of trying to get things organized, I recognized that I really wanted to try my hand at doing real estate deals from the investment perspective instead. I asked to be considered for an investment officer job, and never looked back.

My career proceeded through a series of both institutional investment jobs and entrepreneurial ones. I spent the bulk of the 90s at a place called LaSalle Partners which ultimately became JLL, spending the first half of my tenure there on the investment banking side of the business, and the other half on the pension fund management side.

I was beginning to develop some fairly diverse skills and really understanding the wide variety of capital markets available to support real estate. So, I left LaSalle to start an investment banking business at a competitors shop, but that adventure did not turn out because the guy who wanted me to join announced that he had an internet dream that he was going to pursue and left the firm just a few months after I arrived so I had to scramble. I came back to Chicago and convinced my partner from the LaSalle days to basically get the band back together again.

We started Blue Vista in September of 2002. Today, it's a boutique real estate investment management business, and we raise capital from institutional investors, and then pursue niche investment strategies in the US and a little bit in Canada.