Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Cohen.
Josh, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Real Estate started off very much as a hobby for me. I started my professional career as an electrical engineer with Lockheed Martin for 9 years before deciding to attend business school and become a management consultant. I spent the following 5 years traveling the globe helping large multi-nationals solve some of their biggest business challenges. It was an incredible experience but the grind of weekly travel was impacting other areas of my life. In 2011 my brother Jason and I purchased our first investment property in Boston. This, in my mind at the time, was a fun side project, and possibly a glimpse into my retirement years. You see, my dad was a retired cab driver with a small but profitable portfolio of investment properties. He got to do whatever he wanted most days, travel back and forth between the US and Israel several times a year, and enjoy the security of having a steady stream of income, regardless of what happened to social security or the stock market. As I advanced in my consulting career our real estate portfolio also grew. It was starting to look like a real business, with its own challenges and opportunities. But more importantly than that I was having fun with it
Things began to come into focus for me in 2014. A friend invited me to Burning Man, a temporary community of about 60,000 people that exists for all but one week per year in the Nevada desert. Burning Man is many different things to many different people. To me it was all about getting in touch with my true self. It’s also an incredible display of art and human creativity. Here you were free to be yourself, with no judgment. No money is exchanged either, as everything at Burning Man is gifted to the community by its community. I found that when you are surrounded by so much love, acceptance and art a truly remarkable thing happens – your mind gets calm, you get inspired, and layers of fear and conditioning accumulated over our lifetime begin to dissolve. Your true self begins to emerge. And for me that meant finding a way to ditch the traditional path and to follow my passion
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What I really wanted was to live a more balanced lifestyle, to build a successful real estate business with my brother, and to help others to do the same. I knew we had the seeds of something great and that we would be successful I could focus all of my energy and inner resources into it. I mean, I had been problem solving my whole life. I was advising CEOs and COOs on their businesses, and these were billion dollar enterprises and much more complex. Maximizing the assets we had and applying the knowledge and skills I’d learned to this point in my life to this next chapter in my life now seemed so obvious. In that moment, I decided to take a leap of faith and “retire” from my consulting career – that’s essentially the day Cohen Properties was born.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It hasn’t always been a smooth road and I don’t think it’s necessarily supposed to be. Growth and change can be an uncomfortable process. That said, the challenges for me have largely been psychological. Facing my fears, trusting my intuition, and adapting to a lifestyle in stark contrast to the way I had been conditioned were the biggest obstacles I had to overcome at the beginning. I was now my own master. I made the rules. I had no one to answer to but me. I also had no corporate safety net. This was both liberating and also very scary and a fairly significant source of anxiety at the beginning. To many friends and family, I was making a big mistake and throwing away a bright future. I had three degrees including two master’s degrees that I was, in their eyes, essentially “wasting” to become a real estate agent and landlord. Luckily, not too long after I left management consulting, a friend introduced me to a local Tai Chi and Qigong master. I had been seeking a daily practice to relax my body and mind and to put me in a state in which I knew all the answers could be revealed. I thought a combination of yoga and meditation might do the trick. Tai Chi, as it turns out, was all of those things for me, and a whole lot more. Tai Chi and Qigong showed me, experientially, as crazy as this may sound, that everything in this universe is made up of and driven by energy – our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, and our life circumstances included. It helped me deal with my anxiety, increased my focus, and allowed the answers to the questions I had in my mind to emerge. I began operating with newfound clarity and purpose. The value I could deliver to my clients and business partners increased tenfold from that point on.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Cohen Properties – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Our business has two primary divisions, an investment property division which acquires and operates a portfolio of rental properties, and a real estate agency, which lends our expertise to homeowners looking to buy or sell their own homes or investment properties. Our real estate agency serves three primary markets – investment property sales, single family sales and foreclosure prevention services. What sets us apart is our unique skillset and the level of expertise we can offer our clients – and that comes from experience. Whether it’s maximizing the sales price of your property, purchasing the right home or investment property, securing financing, or helping you understand the economics of a particular real estate decision, we assist our clients through all phases of the real estate lifecycle. We take our clients’ needs seriously and strive to be the most collaborative, dedicated and trusted in the business.
In terms of what I’m most proud of it’s hard to say exactly but I remember distinctly about a year after I left consulting noticing that all the little seeds I had be planting the year prior starting to sprout. That was very gratifying. Just seeing it starting to all come together, whether it was seeing a happy client after a closing or seeing our own portfolio grow and evolve in interesting new directions. Now I get to experience those moments all the time.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We’ve got some really interesting projects on the investment side of the business upcoming. Real Estate development is one area that is really exciting because I love to get creative and design. Taking projects from literally a blank sheet of paper to physical reality has always been a dream of mine and we are currently working on our first few projects which should both be great learning experiences and a lot of fun. I’m also a big fan of the new Imagine Boston 2030 plan and am actively exploring ways to partner with the city to provide more affordable housing.
Pricing:
- 20% off any listing brokerage commissions (mention this article).
Contact Info:
- Address: 619 Centre Street,
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 - Website: www.cohen-properties.com
- Phone: 617-501-6442
- Email: cohenpropertiesteam@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Winston Telesford
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