Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

Hello, Smart Money Tree podcast listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name's Kirk Chisholm and I will be your host.

So today we're talking with Josh Ben Aime. How you doing today, Josh? Great. How you doing?

Good. So Josh, tell us a little about your background. I'm the founder and CEO of ARIA Development Group, a vertically integrated real estate firm that focuses on investing, development, and operation of primarily multifamily real estate. We've renovated

or developed, I would say, a couple thousand units over a billion dollars of total asset value.

And hopefully we've created a fair amount of value in the process as well. We have offices

in New York, Washington, D.C., and Miami,

and we have real estate projects going in all of those cities plus Charlotte, Nashville,

and Kansas City. We espouse a philosophy of real estate value investment, however, combined

with what we look at is old-fashioned real

estate wisdom. How to bring those two disciplines together has been the better part of our

business for the last 20 years and ARIA for the last 10 years. Josh, how did you get started

in real estate? Let's talk about that. I started out in Wall Street, going back to 1997. I went to work for credits, tweets, and merges and acquisitions. I had no idea what the heck I was doing. I signed up for what seemed like a demanding and interesting job to learn finance. And so I came into real estate after spending a couple of years in that field. I really got hooked on real estate when I had the opportunity to work with my uncles,

who are pretty fantastic, legendary characters in the New York real estate space,

who brought me into many of the good things in life of music, great skiers, and have a lot of fun. So basically, I was

called in to help with a project in Lower Manhattan, which was after September 11th, New York

City had gotten hit really hard. And we owned a parcel in a family consortium that was on

William Street, way downtown, very close to the former Twin Towers site.

So I got involved with the development of that project, initially a little bit as a weekend

warrior, to try to help out.

And what I learned really fascinated me.

It was a time when the federal government had passed Liberty

...