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Paul Amoruso, the owner of Jericho-based commercial real estate brokerage firm Oxford & Simpson, has made a career of making big deals for Long Island office space.
Over his 34 years of brokerage service, Amoruso has helped establish a Long Island presence for corporate clients such as Broadridge, Canon USA and Computer Associates. But he's also invested back in the region by developing a half-dozen hotels that serve that same business sector.
A graduate of New York University's prestigious real estate program and co-founder of the Commercial Industrial Brokers Society here, Amoruso says Long Island needs to step up its efforts to retain its younger talented workforce to remain economically viable.
Was it challenging to go from real estate broker to real estate developer? My ambition from the beginning was to become a real estate developer, where I can develop a reoccurring revenue model with multiple properties. I saw these prominent real estate developers of that era like Fred DeMatteis who built EAB Plaza, now RXR Plaza, Don Rechler, Jerry Wolkoff and Walter Gross, the original developer of the Hauppauge Industrial Park. It became apparent to me that without the capital, the experience or the pedigree, I really didn't have a shot at it as a career. There were no apprentice positions in real estate as there was in engineering, as there was in printing, as there were in other industries, it just wasn't out there. I decided to go into the commercial brokerage business. You had to stay at home, you had to eat your kill and you had to evolve. Always having that aspiration to own real estate, I knew I had a long road to figure things out.
So how did you start in the hotel business? The hotel market started out as a roadside inn type of...