NJIT didn’t need a slide deck to explain why it needed a real estate center. It just needed to point out the window.
A few hundred yards from where the university officially launched its new Profeta Real Estate Center in late June, a 16-story, 453-bed residence hall was rising on Summit Street — financed with 30-year bonds, built with a lower-carbon concrete developed in an NJIT lab, and, according to NJIT Provost (and soon to be Interim President) John Pelesko, “drawn and redrawn until it belonged to this campus and belonged to this city.”
“That’s the work that this campus already does,” he said. “We have, of course, been developing real estate in Newark for years. We just didn’t always call it that.”
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What NJIT is now calling it, officially, is the Profeta Real Estate Technology, Design and Innovation Center — a graduate program built to fuse finance, engineering, architecture and environmental skills into a single degree. The pitch isn’t to mint another generation of narrow specialists. It’s to build generalists fluent enough in all of it to make a project like Oak Hall actually happen.
“Real estate developers today need to be multitalented,” Paul Profeta, the center’s founding donor and owner of Roseland-based Paul V. Profeta & Associates, said. “Not to be an expert in any one of them, but to be conversant, to be a renaissance person, to know all of these things so that it gets done properly.”
Profeta, who also helped launch real estate centers at Columbia and Rutgers, has been talking this program up in ambitious terms.
“This is the MIT of New Jersey — and many people don’t realize it,” he said. “The faculty is unbelievable, the research is over the top and the students are incredibly intelligent and hardworking.”
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The center’s board reads like a highlight reel of the state’s commercial real estate industry: Gus Milano of Hartz Mountain Industries, Chris Paladino of Devco, Jose Cruz of JLL, John Saraceno Jr. of Onyx Equities, Chris Murphy of Murphy Schiller & Wilkes, Jeff Milanaik of Kurv Industrial and Frank Giantomasi of Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi, alongside executive director Michael Netta.
Milanaik, a 1980 NJIT engineering graduate, said the program finally gives shape to something the industry has needed for years.
“When Paul laid this program out, I said, ‘This is the first time I can actually wrap my hands around what we can do for people that are interested in real estate, understanding how to pull in different resources at the right time,’” Milanaik said.
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Profeta seeded the program in 2021 with the largest single donation in NJIT’s history — a gift that also funded a center for minority entrepreneurs. Classes begin in spring 2027, the same year Oak Hall itself opens.
Pelesko circled back to that building to close out the launch, and it’s as good a closing argument as the program will get. Most students who move into Oak Hall, he said, will never think twice about the bonds, the concrete or the design standards behind it. To them, it’ll just be home.
“But some of them — the ones that come through the center — will look up at a building like that one and see all of it at once: the finance and the engineering, the design and the care for the place it stands in,” Pelesko said. “And they will know how to build the next one. That is the work that we begin here today.”
