JP Rosenbaum: Construction Manager By Day, Bachelorette Winner By Night
By Jotham Sederstrom January 10, 2012 11:06 am
reprintsBefore he became a reality TV staple, he had been working on the development, which is on the site of the old Avis rental car headquarters and is owned by Equity One, a Miami-based real estate investment trust. The site had five buildings that were abated of asbestos and demolished, and with construction not set to start until summer of 2011, Mr. Rosenbaum had the perfect window to try out for The Bachelorette.
There were no guarantees that he would return to a job with Equity One, or with the J Companies.
“That project was probably our biggest at the moment, and had the developer said, ‘We’re doing fine without you,’” he said, “I don’t know if I would have been hired back here or not.”
“[If] I was to bet, I would say they were going to hire me back. But it was still a risk.”
Mr. Rosenbaum, whose father was a developer and landlord, first went into real estate after college. He worked as a commercial real estate broker at Insignia/ESG’s office in Syosset, grew disillusioned with the business and shifted to online advertising. After three years, he realized his real estate roots were too hard to ignore.
He quit his job, traveled to Australia for two months, returned to the country and got his master’s in construction management at NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate in the night, while working for his father and brother’s real estate business during the day.
After finishing his master’s, one of his professors, Chuck Olivieri, also a senior vice president at Edward J. Minskoff Equities, put him in touch with Allan and David Brot, the fraternal co-owners of the J Companies.
The Brot brothers were impressed with the young Mr. Rosenbaum. But to get him, they had to do their own bit of Bachelorette-esque wooing.
“We interviewed maybe three times, offered him a job,” said Allan Brot. “He said maybe. We took him out for dinner, he said maybe. We took him out for [another] dinner, he said yes.”
Mr. Rosenbaum quickly went to work, taking part in construction projects like Forest City Ratner’s 80 DeKalb and Savanna Partners’ 141 Fifth Avenue.
He also suffered his own construction heartbreak in the form of 71 Laight Street, working on the preconstruction of the Morris Adjmi-designed building that was prematurely halted.
“It was an unbelievable design by Morris Adjmi that we were really, really, looking forward to building but never happened,” he said. The site of the development is currently up for sale.
