Joel joined Hilco Real Estate in 2012 and leads the disposition group, assisting clients with monetizing owned and leasehold real estate with a focus on industrial, retail and special use assets.
In his thirty+ years of real estate experience, he has developed a broad range of expertise, covering the areas of sale transactions, asset and portfolio management, valuation and investment analysis, development, financing, and strategic planning. Joel specializes in assisting clients who are generally not in the real estate business — usually in the context of a bankruptcy, liquidation, or corporate restructuring — with implementing strategies to create liquidity from their surplus real estate assets. Some of his clients include Cenveo, Hostess, Sun Capital Partners, Lowe’s, FTI Consulting, CIBC, American Blue Ribbon Holdings, H/2 Capital Partners, Furniture Brands, Ares Management, and Service King.
Prior to joining HRE, Joel was a principal at Atlas Partners, a Chicago-based boutique real estate advisory firm where he handled asset dispositions for his clients which included attorneys, lenders, and turnaround firms. Prior to Atlas, Joel was a senior manager in the Midwest practice of Ernst & Young’s Real Estate Advisory Services group. There he led assignments for clients including Best Buy Co. and Equity Office Properties. Much of the focus of his consulting work was devising and implementing cost saving and improvement strategies related to his clients’ real estate holdings.
As vice president for portfolio management at American Express’ internal corporate real estate department, Joel was responsible for strategic programming and transactional support with regard to the company’s 18 million square foot real estate portfolio it occupied around the world.
At the Balcor Company, an institutional owner of real estate, Joel was managing director of portfolio management, where he was involved with creating, underwriting, and supporting workout strategies for many of the company’s real estate assets, including retail, office, industrial, multifamily, and vacant land.
Joel earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Indiana University and a master’s degree in city planning from Harvard University. He is a licensed real estate broker and is a member of several professional organizations, including the Turnaround Management Association, the American Bankruptcy Institute, the National Association of Federal Equity Receivers, and the Chicago Real Estate Council where he previously served as its president.