VBComing from the world of finance, I think I initially was really interested in the fundamentals of real estate and what it meant to invest, create value, and look for profits in housing versus stocks, options, or other instruments in the financial markets. Along the way, our brand just continued to grow as we moved from mostly construction rehab work to also including more redevelopment and new development work. We continued to be involved in general contracting from there and transitioned to apartment-style new construction on our next project, which was a ground-up condo development. Our buyers were police officers, a New Jersey Transit manager, a manager at Home Depot, just to name a few. In that first project, we were building low income and workforce duplexes in Newark, which we sold to people from the area. We continued mainly doing rehab projects, and then transitioned into our first ground-up new construction project at the end of ‘08. Eventually, we combined our entities and our energies and created the umbrella of Mid-Atlantic. Hassan was doing the same thing and he was actually the one who had gotten me into the business. Mid-Atlantic came about after a few years of individually investing and participating in real estate. Eventually those relationships formed into a decently strong and reliable construction team, which helped make my early projects possible. As I invested my time and learned the business I also started building relationships and my network. However, over time after managing different investments and crews, I kind of naturally picked up general contracting and construction management. It wasn’t necessarily a smooth transition out of finance though as I didn’t have a background in construction. When we moved, we bought a two-family and my single-family home at the same time, so we were relocating and also starting to invest in multifamily housing. I started really getting into it probably a year or so before moving to New Jersey. I found it to be a digestible investment that was simple to understand. I was actually working in finance at the time, but I had friends who were active multifamily investors and I was learning about rehabbing and flipping properties from them. They've been with us about two years now, and they're playing a significant part in our future vision and they'll be a big part of what we do going forward. Brandon and Tahir are our newest partners. Michael was the first new partner to join the firm, about eight years ago, and I’ll say he’s been very instrumental in helping to take the firm in new directions that have really solidified our footing. Hassan and I were college roommates and we started and grew this business together. I'm the managing member, Hassan is our primary construction manager and runs general construction for us, and Michael is focused on the overall business development of the firm. So it's a five member firm and that’s the core group, but we also have consulting relationships with a bunch of our other team members. And we have other partners that are part of our team as well, Brandon Copeland and Tahir Whitehead. There are three main managing partners: myself, Hassan Keith, and Michael Adams on a day-to-day basis. Officially, we are a registered construction manager and GC, but we’ve also been the Sponsor on multiple projects that we've been involved in. Since then, we've been active in the northern New Jersey area with a focus on commercial redevelopment and new construction. We've been operating for about 16 years now, since about 2008 the company really got going right as the housing collapse and recession was happening. VBWe are Mid-Atlantic Investment Alliance and we’re a proud Black-owned developer and general contractor.
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