Don’t knock good luck - New England Real Estate Journal was founded 55 years ago on great luck - by Roland Hopkins

It’s January 17, 1963 and the three journal partners are struggling late at night on the sixth floor of a $2 per s/f office building overlooking Copley Sq. in Boston. None of them know anything about publishing, selling adds, interviewing, but this 12-page tabloid was to be the first of a weekly commercial real estate tabloid newspaper. 

It was originally Herb Siegel’s idea who was a 30-year-old, not very successful, real estate broker. He had presented the idea of the New England Real Estate Journal to my then 27-year-old self. At the time, I had a fun five year radio disc jockey career in towns like Milford, MA, Bristol, CT and Portland, ME. The third partner was the most important–the finance guy, 27-year-old George Cleveland. George was my college roommate and had just spent two years in the Army. He had also inherited some money and got married. Becoming a newspaper editor appealed to him. So I decided to check with some respectable people who could give knowledgeable advice. 

My first visit was with Ray Hofford, the president of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board. Hofford politely said that the timing was terrible. At the time, in New England, there was only one industrial park, one shopping mall, no nursing homes and commercial real estate was a very slow industry. 

I then visited Frank Perry of the well respected A.W. Perry Company. Perry said that the timing was very bad for commercial real estate. Only one high-rise office building had been built in Boston in the last five years. 

After that I visited a very respected young real estate lawyer whose father had become very successful purchasing and refurbishing apartment buildings “Bermanizing.” The young lawyer, Marty Berman, told me that his father was the only real estate business man who was succeeding in thinking forward with new ideas. This is where luck appears. 

The three novices decided to go ahead and start the weekly commercial real estate newspaper. Cleveland packed his Minnesota bags, and brought his money to Massachusetts. The three of us rented two small rooms in a nice Copley Sq. office building. At the end of the first year the Journal had spent all of Cleveland’s investment and he decided to pack his bags and take his wife back to Minnesota. 

In the meantime, a down and out older salesman applied for a job. The newspaper had no money to pay his salary but he suggested that we pay him commissions on his sales. It worked. He was the greatest salesman I have ever met. I became the student while the new salesman, Bob Lewis, became the teacher. When Lewis was teaching me to sell, we decided our time was much better spent getting out of the office and knocking on doors rather than worrying about the editing of the weekly newspaper. Lewis knew an editor who had worked for his newspaper a few years earlier, so I called him and invited him to an interview. When I met him I realized that he knew much more about editing than I would ever know, so I hired him and believe it or not he was employed by the journal for 52 years. Thank you Ben Summers. 

As time went on, shopping centers were being built. The Prudential Center broke ground. And some brilliant mind came up with the idea of condominiums. Also helping the commercial real estate business, someone decided that Berman was a pretty smart guy so why not buy and remodel office buildings. 

I bought Siegel’s share of the company, with the help of a secret investor who had no interest in being a newspaper man, but he went on to become a very successful commercial real estate developer. 

The Journal became very successful thanks to luck–the commercial real estate world exploded all over the country during the Journal’s second and third years in business. 

Happy 55th Birthday to the New England Real Estate Journal. 

I like to claim I was ten years old on that January 17th night that my two partners and I fumbled around to publish the first issue of the New England Real Estate Journal, which just so happens to be my birthday.

Roland Hopkins is the founder of the New England Real Estate Journal, Norwell, Mass.