ABOUT THE BOOK
Before co-founding BH3 Management, a real estate company that has invested more than $1.5 billion in commercial debt and equity, Daniel Lebensohn was a Jewish boy in 1970s Long Island interested in going on joy rides with his friends, getting into fist fights and chasing girls.
After seeing his father’s business savvy with rental properties, Lebensohn developed a new mission: to embrace a winning real estate mindset and become a world-class investor. From there, his dreams of writing the next Great American Novel gave way to legal and financial ambitions as he transformed from rebellious teenager to real estate success story.
After bouncing back from an imploded startup during the dot com boom and learning from one of the tri-state area’s prominent real estate dynasties, Lebensohn began using deal making as a creative outlet by artfully syndicating his own real estate deals and investing in distressed debt with his lifelong friends. Still, despite his success, a deeper artistic streak tugged at him.
After relocating to Florida, Lebensohn and his business partners found the deal of a lifetime: an undeveloped island in the bay of Miami that their firm had carte blanche to build on. Bursting with ideas, he befriended muralists and commissioned local architects to bring his ultimate creative statement to life—until a multi-year lawsuit halted construction riled the entire city and threatened to destroy everything he and his partners had worked for.
Authentic yet practical, The Art of the Real is a treasure trove of hard-earned wisdom about competing in the most cutthroat markets in the world without losing a sense of joy—or your childhood best friends. A real estate memoirlike no other, Lebensohn takes readers on a fast-paced ride which proves that when it comes to business, nurturing lifelong relationships offers the greatest possible returns on sweat equity.
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a message from the author:
What’s happening right now with the people you care about around you is the most important thing of all. It’s actually the only thing that exists.
Ultimately, I’ve found that this mantra is relatively all-purpose when it comes to life and relationships, but only if you apply it the right way. Whether you feel you have it all already or you’re still on your journey, whether things are going smoothly or you’re being hit with so much adversity that it seems like everything is going to fall apart, you always have the choice to take a breath and greet the world with smile on your face.
I have no intention of drafting yet another “how-to” or “how-not-to” treatise. There is certainly no shortage of advice on how to be successful and live the good life today, although what that means depends on who you ask.
We get a lot of the what and some of the how, but few people talk about the why. As an artistic soul who has succeeded in business, I hope to convey to aspiring entrepreneurs that art and business need not be separate—in fact, they shouldn’t be. In this book, I walk you through how.
