By Anwar Faisal, Boston, MA
Where It Started
My first property was a one-bedroom, 590-square-foot apartment. I bought it in 1984, when I was still a student. I did not buy it because I had a grand plan for thousands of units. I bought it because it was what I could afford, and because I believed owning something, anything, was better than owning nothing.
That apartment taught me more than any class I took. It taught me what a leaking pipe costs, what a late rent payment feels like from the other side, and how much patience it takes to fix a problem the right way instead of the fast way.
The Lesson I Did Not Expect
I thought real estate was about the property. It is not. It is about the people living in it.
Every unit I have ever owned came with a person attached to it, someone with a job, a family, a semester to finish, or a flight to catch. The buildings do not tell you that. You learn it by managing them, one tenant and one problem at a time.
Once I understood that, everything else got easier. Maintenance requests stopped being annoyances and became the actual job. A quick response to a broken heater is not a favor. It is the work.
Growth Is Not a Straight Line
Going from one apartment to thousands of units did not happen in a straight line, and it did not happen fast. Some years I added a building. Other years I added nothing, because the numbers did not make sense or because I needed to fix what I already had before I took more on. Patience, contentment, and resilience have been essential to a healthy real estate business.
I see a lot of people confuse growth with speed. They want to scale before they know how to run what they already own. I would rather own fewer properties and run them well than own more and run them poorly. A building with a bad reputation is expensive in ways that never show up on a spreadsheet.
Why I Kept Reinvesting
I did not turn a profit out of the business early on. I put it back in. Every unit I bought made the next one possible, and every dollar I reinvested expanded that first 590 square feet.
This is the part people starting out underestimate. The temptation to spend early gains is real, especially once a business starts working. I understood early that the business would grow only as fast as I was willing to feed it, so I kept feeding it.
I also learned to give back at the same time I was building. Giving has never felt like something separate from the business to me. A portion of what comes in goes out, to mosques, to schools, to community causes. That habit started early and never stopped, and it did not slow the growth down. If anything, it kept me honest about why I was building in the first place.
Immigrating as a student from Palestine, I know what it’s like to struggle, to wake up for classes during the day after working all night, to be responsible for supporting others before I was a teenager, to labor for hours in the sun only to walk miles back home. My buildings have given me the opportunity to lend a helping hand to those whose paths I am all too familiar with.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Today
Start with what you can actually manage, not what looks impressive. One well-run property beats five that you cannot keep up with.
Learn the maintenance side before you learn the finance side. Numbers on paper do not tell you if a roof needs fixing.
Expect the first few years to feel slow. They are supposed to. The growth compounds later, not right away.
The Business Is Also the Family
My children are part of the business now. I did not plan for that when I bought that first apartment. I just kept building, and eventually the work became something the family did together, not something I did alone. I spent years supporting my family, those close to home and abroad, so it feels like a natural extension to work with them, instead of simply for them.
That is probably the real lesson from thirty years of this. You do not start out building a legacy. You start out fixing a leaking pipe in a 590-square-foot apartment, and you keep showing up. The scale comes later, if it comes at all. What stays constant is the work itself, done the same way, for the right reasons, whether you own one unit or a thousand.