Weekend Interview: Philly Office Retail's Ken Weinstein On ‘Doing Well By Doing Good’

This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities who keep CRE interesting.

Ken Weinstein's journey in real estate is a familiar one. He made real estate development his full-time job after 17 years spending nights and weekends on it as a side gig.

But it was a job in politics that brought Ken Weinstein to Philadelphia from his boyhood home in North Jersey. Even 20 years into his real estate career as president of Philly Office Retail, he hasn't left civic engagement behind, and to former colleagues from his life in politics, his new career makes him a valuable resource.

Eight years ago, Weinstein launched Jumpstart Germantown, an education and mentorship program to give aspiring developers their first shot in the industry. He soon recognized that all the mentorship in the world won't make a difference to someone who can't secure financing for their first project.

That's when he started a loan program using his personal line of credit. As Jumpstart kept producing successes, Weinstein was able to secure outside funding for the loan program through nonprofits and community banks. And because of those successes, others wanted to launch their own versions of Jumpstart in their own neighborhoods.

Rather than attempting to build a business out of Jumpstart, Weinstein veered hard in the other direction: He made it open-source. Jumpstart put all of the program's class materials online and began holding quarterly meetings for local sponsors to share knowledge. 

To date, 13 other Jumpstart programs have been founded, from Philly neighborhoods like Kensington and Tioga to other Pennsylvania municipalities like Harrisburg, Coatesville and Norristown, and even three out of state: Wilmington, Delaware, Oklahoma City and the Martindale–Brightwood area in Indiana.

In the past couple of months, Jumpstart has made two major expansion moves: making its loan program citywide and hiring a national recruiter and organizer to get new local Jumpstarts off the ground.

For the past 16 years, Weinstein has also served on the board of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp., the public agency that oversees both housing assistance programs and the two entities tasked with disposing of city-owned land in the Philadelphia Land Bank and the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. He has been the board's chair for most of that time.

Real estate developers, especially those in the business for decades, often have active civic and philanthropic lives on top of their jobs. But to Weinstein, keeping those two pursuits separate is just as much of a choice as being a mission-driven developer.

"You don't have to be one or the other," Weinstein said. "You can do both together."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bisnow: How and why did you get into real estate initially?

Weinstein: I felt a real need to work with my hands and remove blight from my community. I grew up in the suburbs of New York, in a town called Somerset, New Jersey. And for the most part, we didn't have blight.

I moved to Philadelphia in 1984 to work on a political campaign for Joe Hoeffel, who was running for Congress at the time. It really hit me in the face as I drove around the neighborhoods and saw a lot of blighted buildings, and I swore to myself that I would never normalize the blight process.

Bisnow: What prompted the career switch?

Weinstein: I enjoyed a lot of careers over time: political organizing, fundraising for nonprofits and later working as chief of staff for City Councilwoman Happy Fernandez. But I was always frustrated with not being hands-on and making things happen, and real estate development helped close that gap for me.

Bisnow: So rather than become civically involved through real estate, your civic life predates your real estate career?

Weinstein: Exactly. Civic involvement is something that I always had inside of me, that my parents instilled in me. And I knew whatever I did in life, I wanted to make my community better, and real estate's clearly a way of doing that.

Bisnow: So, you never left civic involvement behind. But with Jumpstart and with your position as chair of the PHDC board, you've become something of a civic leader. How did that come about?

Weinstein: I did real estate part time for 17 years before I went into it full time. And during that whole period, I was able to have day jobs where I could make a difference, and then do real estate on evenings and weekends.

Eventually, that changed, and I put all that aside and made real estate my daytime job and started hiring staff. I've always been a believer that you shouldn't just make money during the day and do good deeds in the evening, that your day job should be consistent with your goals and mission. And that's what I've attempted to do.

You can't just put your head in the sand and say, “I'm going to renovate buildings” or “I'm going to do new construction.” You have to have a broader scope of work. That includes being a community developer. It includes finding other ways to improve your community. And that also includes the sometimes messy business of being involved with politics and public policy.

Bisnow: Within real estate, your focus or specialty has become adaptive reuse and renovation of historically protected buildings. Did that have more of a business reason, or did it come from your desire to do good?

Weinstein: I recognized early on that I could make more money by gentrifying neighborhoods, but I purposely chose not to do that and instead focus on triple-bottom-line development where we can do well by doing good.

I call myself an accidental preservationist because my priority mission is removing blight and doing adaptive reuse of buildings. Well, it just so happens that a lot of the buildings that need to be restored and reused are historic. So I often tell my preservationist friends that we're on the same page, but I'm not a preservationist.

Bisnow: So, your decision to found Jumpstart Germantown came from your desire to make a positive impact — that's the why. But why start it when you did, and how did it come about?

Weinstein: I've been doing real estate full time for 20 years now, starting with a staff of one and building it up to 25 [employees]. As I got more involved in real estate development, more and more people would knock on my door and say, ‘Hey, can you tell me how you get started in real estate? Because I want to do what you're doing.’

And, of course, you pay it forward, so I'd sit down with folks for an hour at a time, but I wasn't really helping them. So that's when I decided eight years ago to just start saying no to one-on-one mentoring and instead develop a curriculum, a 16-hour curriculum, that could actually help folks get started in real estate development.

Bisnow: What about the curriculum makes it more effective than one-on-one mentoring?

Weinstein: One-on-one mentoring was only for an hour at a time, and I was more of a cheerleader: ‘Here's how I got started, and you can do it too. Good luck to you.’

The 16-hour curriculum that we have developed through the Jumpstart training program reviews what I call the seven jump steps of real estate development. And it doesn't start with sourcing properties. It starts with thinking through why you're doing what you're doing and being more purposeful and more mission-driven than just sourcing properties, flipping them and making money.

And then, at the end of our training program, we assign each of our graduates to a mentor who can help walk them through their first, second and third projects. It helps our graduates to go through our 16-hour training program, but if they don't have someone to hold their hand through their first project, they're likely not going to enjoy the benefits of real estate development.

Bisnow: Is that because the mentors help open doors for new developers, or is it more of a mental barrier for new developers to get over?

Weinstein: It's a mental barrier. For the people who go through our Jumpstart training program that never become real estate developers, very often it's because of a lack of confidence, right? In the Jumpstart training program, we talk about risk in the first class.

A lot of people are not ready to jump in with both feet and risk the last $20K they have in the bank. But if you have a mentor that walks you through the process, you are more likely to get over that barrier.

Bisnow: So at Jumpstart, it's not about training new developers so much as training new impact developers.

Weinstein: That's exactly right. We can't guarantee what type of developers people are going to be once they graduate from our program, but we can show them the benefits of sharing resources, of cooperating and collaborating with other developers, and developing for the right reasons.

Bisnow: Why did you take Jumpstart citywide after eight years of focusing on Germantown?

Weinstein: There's blight all over the city, and we wanted to increase our mission. We were also hearing a lot of demand from other parts of the city that wanted access to our loan program.

Bisnow: Tell me more about the Jumpstart loan program. Why was it in such demand?

Weinstein: Once we started the training program a few years ago, we quickly realized that we can train up people all we want, but if we don't show them how to network with other developers and vendors, and if we don't provide them with funding sources, we're not helping them.

Because banks, in general, will not lend to newbie developers. They don't like making relatively small loans, and they don't like providing construction loans because they're messy. So we decided that if we were going to truly help our graduates get into real estate development, we needed to start loaning them money.

We get loan applications on a daily basis from program graduates and nongraduates alike. There's an online application, and we quickly inspect those properties and can close within a week, if necessary. What we're trying to do here is help make our Jumpstart graduates look like cash buyers so they can compete with developers like me that have a line of credit.

Bisnow: And how did you set up the capital side of the loan program?

Weinstein: Initially, we used my personal line of credit that I had with J.P. Morgan. And once our model was proven effective, we were then able to borrow from the Local Initiatives Support Corp. and The Reinvestment Fund, two organizations that share similar missions with us, and TriState Capital Bank. 

It took several years to prove our model was effective, to show potential funders that we had no foreclosures, because we were doing the riskiest loans that banks didn't want to do.

To date, we have closed more than 390 loans, and we are approaching $50M in total commitments since 2015, with an average loan size of $122K. 

Bisnow: What's the largest project to receive a Jumpstart loan?

Weinstein: We did a million-dollar project, which was four twin houses near each other on West Upsal Street. Three of them were five-unit [properties] and one was four units. They were all blighted properties, and this developer was able to acquire all of them at once and renovate them into apartments.

Bisnow: How many of these blighted properties have been acquired from the city through its Land Bank?

Weinstein: For the most part, people have had a hard time accessing the Land Bank. That's changing with a new city program that offers Land Bank properties up for anyone who's willing to commit to long-term affordable housing.

Bisnow: Right, Turn The Key. You have a unique vantage point for that program, being that you chair the board of PHDC. How did you find yourself in that position?

Weinstein: I think it was relationships meeting opportunity, but it's also a recognition of triple-bottom-line developers out there being in demand by mayors who want to use their expertise.

I was nominated to the board by Mayor Michael Nutter 16 years ago, was eventually elevated to chair, and then renominated by Mayor Jim Kenney. Both Jim and Michael got elected to city council the same year as Happy Fernandez when I was her chief of staff, so we all came into council together, and I got to know them as very hardworking leaders. So when they needed to make appointments after getting elected mayor, they each reached out to me.

Bisnow: Why PHDC? I'm sure with those relationships and your expertise, you're qualified for several board seats or similar positions.

Weinstein: One thing is I had already transitioned to commercial developments. And PHDC is more focused on residential, so I knew there would be fewer conflicts of interest rather than joining, say, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority board or the zoning board of adjustment — boards that I have more contact with professionally.

I also admired PHDC's mission of working hard to keep people in their homes. It fits right in line with what Jumpstart is doing, because in my mind, our priority should be keeping folks in their homes. A repair [to keep a home livable] costs maybe $15K or $20K versus letting a house go vacant and blighted, which then costs a Jumpstarter over $100K [to redevelop].

Bisnow: What have you learned about development in Philadelphia from your chairperson's seat?

Weinstein: Because of my role with PHDC and my previous life in public policy, I am able to see both sides of some of these issues. I don't just see things as a developer. I'm also able to understand why employees at City Hall or elected officials do what they do, and because of that, I spend a lot of time interpreting what City Hall does for developers out there.

Bisnow: Give us a bold prediction for the rest of the year.

Weinstein: I think that interest rates and construction costs are not going to move greatly for the rest of 2023. But the office market is going to continue to decline as loans become due and investors are forced to refinance — or try to.

Bisnow: What is either your weekend routine or favorite weekend activity now that real estate is your day job and no longer taking up your weekends?

Weinstein: I definitely need time off on weekends. I very much enjoy working in my garden and the mindless nature of weeding. And I also am a very competitive person, so I enjoy a good pickleball game.

Bisnow: Ah, pickleball, the new hot real estate amenity.

Weinstein: I have to admit, I am guilty of looking at a blighted warehouse and asking my staff how many pickleball courts we can fit in there.