Following The Footsteps Of Your Parents Real Estate Business

So lots of times when people are growing up, the kids run as far as they can from everything that their parents are doing. I think this is probably true of all kids. You want to do whatever is the opposite of what your parents did, run the other way as you put it. And so for a period of time, that was just not something that Scott Choppin was interested in, but really two things brought forth for him how real estate development can be a career. So first was that out of high school, he wasn't tending to go to college immediately or at least he didn't have a good plan. So Scott went and worked in the trades. He was an electrician for a couple of years and what he noticed at the time, and we were living on a long beach. There were a lot of apartment new constructions which was in the mid-eighties. Just booming apartments and he remembers just working on the job sites and electricians are actually probably some of the cleanest trades, you're not getting overly dirty, it takes most knowledge.

But the developers would show up on the job site and he would watch them, in between working and because he had the background in it and watch what they were doing. Scott was like, "I want to be that guy." He wanted to, drive a nice car, show up, look at a project under construction, point some stuff out, make some decisions. That's how he interpreted it, at least at the time, he was 18 or 19 years old. He is a voracious reader and at the time, in fact, still around, he thinks it's still being published, but there's a book called, "How to make $1 Million Investing in Real Estate on the Weekends".

You've probably even seen it, right? It's one of those age-old books. And he read through that and it really finally dawned on him. He went, "okay, I see what my dad, him and my uncle are doing." He saw these guys in the field, seen how they are and what they did. And then the financial mechanisms were really shown to me in this book. Now that book was about investing in existing apartment assets and not in construction or development, but he could see the parallels. And so from that point on, which he thinks he was 18 years old as he recalls, everything he did from that point on, it was intended to build his knowledge of how to be a real estate developer. School major, school choice, early career choices were all aligned to do that with the end result. He knew he would be going out on my own as an entrepreneur.