Bio
D
uring a career as a real estate investment banker that spanned over 40 years, A. Joseph (“Joe”) Traum was involved in several hundred transactions totaling billions of dollars, each one unique. Invariably, a moment would come when a deal appeared to be in jeopardy, and someone on the negotiating team would say in frustration, “We should write a book about this one!” Joe never let on that he planned to do just that.
Upon retirement from the business world in 2005, Joe underwent a year of training at New York’s Gotham Writers’ Workshop. GWW’s concept is to teach the craft by having participants write short stories. As explained early on by one of the coaches, “If you write a novel that’s a failure, you’ve wasted a lot of time. But if your short story isn’t any good, then go ahead and write another one.” One of Joe’s presentations at the workshop involved a real estate executive who used the techniques of his trade in trying to find his son’s murderer. The critical praise he received led Joe to believe the story warranted an expansion from thirty pages to 416. He was thrilled when Cambridge House Press accepted Waking Up for publication.
The term “real estate investment banker” often perplexed people, including Joe’s family. “What exactly do you do?” he would be asked. The question would remind Joe of the answer once given by Ben Lambert, the legendary Chairman of Eastdil Realty (the pre-eminent real estate investment bank in the U.S. where Joe worked for over fourteen years), when a potential client from the Middle East demanded an explanation. Ben walked the man to the picture window of the conference room that overlooked San Francisco. He pointed at Embarcadero Center and said, “See that?” In the distance, he identified the Pier 39 retail complex at Fisherman’s Wharf and said, “See that?” He pointed out several other dominant properties in the skyline and asked the same question. Then, he turned to his visitor and said with a flourish, “We made those happen.”
Some of the signature properties that Joe was involved in during his career were:
New York’s Olympic Tower, located across 52nd Street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the first mixed-use building in the U.S. It has ground-level retail space on Fifth Avenue, twenty floors of office space, and thirty floors of residential condominiums. The company Joe then worked at, Arlen Realty, was a partner with Victory Carriers, the entity owned by the legendary Aristotle Onassis, who by then had married Jacqueline Kennedy. (Talk about real estate stories!)
The Westchester, co-developed by The O’Connor Group and Nomura Real Estate, Joe’s employer, which remains one of the dominant regional shopping centers in the New York metropolitan area.
Orlando’s Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes. The first time Joe drove through the property in a four-wheel drive truck in 1990, it was filled with gopher tortoises and grazing cattle.
Joe’s first experience in writing for publication came when he joined with other leading practitioners of shopping center development and revealed the industry’s secrets in Shopping Centers and Other Retail Properties. He contributed Chapter 7, covering property analysis. The work, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 1996, has been selected as a textbook for many top graduate school MBA programs, and was also marketed and sold successfully in Europe as a business tome. Click here to view this chapter.
Joe’s last thirteen years in business were at Nomura Real Estate, one of the largest Japanese developers. His work with this company brought him to Japan many times and enabled him to gain an insider’s understanding of what his colleagues would refer to as “the Japanese way.”
While Waking Up might stand on its own as a murder-mystery, the blending in of real estate transactions and the scenes with Japanese characters, especially those that take place in Japan, make it a unique and singular work.
Joe lives in Secaucus, NJ with Rhoda, his wife of forty-three years. Their two children, Juliet and Seth, have lives (and children) of their own.